A power event took down one of the three zones in Google Cloud's London region on Tuesday, October 20, and the effects did not stay inside that zone. The outage came weeks after Microsoft told customers that Azure prices in seven regions, six of them in Europe, will rise on February 1, 2027. Four days before it, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) proposed new oversight of Microsoft's business software, including how its licensing affects which cloud customers can run it on.
The three developments are separate. For UK and European buyers they bear on one decision: where a workload runs, and what it costs to run it in more than one place.
One zone down, errors beyond it
Google's incident page dates the start to 23:08 Pacific time on October 19, which is 06:08 UTC on October 20, and attributes the outage to a power event in the europe-west2-b zone. The symptoms it lists are services unavailable in that zone and "elevated errors and intermittent network issues" for some services elsewhere in the europe-west2 region. The page names 38 affected products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Cloud Load Balancing.
At 11:58 UTC Google said the power event was mitigated and that it was prioritizing recovery of existing workloads, adding: "Customers may not be able to yet create new workloads." Its suggested workaround was to move affected workloads to another zone or region "if feasible." The status page showed normal service for most customers at 14:03 UTC, The Register reported, and Google said it would publish an analysis after its internal investigation.
Consumer services went down the same morning. Card payments, transfers and cash withdrawals at Revolut were among those affected, Quartz reported, citing The Wall Street Journal. Revolut's statement said customers' money and data were safe but did not name a cause.
Two details matter more than the duration. A failure in one zone produced errors elsewhere in the region, which is the failure that multi-zone design exists to contain. The warning about new workloads also tests a common assumption in recovery plans: that surviving zones will have spare capacity to launch into. Capacity already running in other zones could keep serving. Capacity a team planned to start on demand during an incident is the part that warning puts in doubt.
London follows a July outage in Google's Netherlands region. An electrical fault on the utility grid supplying a data center disrupted power distribution and disabled cooling, taking a europe-west4 zone down for 14 hours and 55 minutes, Computing reported, citing Google's incident report. Forrester analyst Biswajeet Mahapatra told The Register that customers are encouraged to spread workloads across zones but have limited visibility into whether some managed services still depend on a single physical facility.
Azure prices rise in seven regions from February
Microsoft notified customers through Azure Service Health in early October that prices for specific virtual machine and storage services in seven regions will rise on February 1, 2027, Techzine reported. The notice, which a Microsoft partner reposted in a Microsoft Q&A thread, puts North Europe (Dublin) at 17 percent, France Central and France South at 11 percent, West Europe (Amsterdam), Norway East and Norway West at 9 percent, and Southeast Asia (Singapore) at 8 percent. It cites market conditions, more consistent pricing across regions, and investment in capacity and hardware.
Microsoft listed exclusions rather than affected services. The v1, v2 and v7 VM series and a set of storage services, including General Block Blob, Tables and Queues, are excluded from the regional increase, so the widely used D-series and E-series v4 to v6 generations will rise, according to Techzine. Microsoft partner Lemontree says selected v1 and v2 series face a separate global increase of about 25 percent from the same date, replacing rather than adding to the regional rise, Techzine reported.
There is no public announcement. In the Q&A thread on October 5, a volunteer moderator wrote that there was "no publicly-available announcement," only the advisory in the Azure portal.
Commitments soften the change only partly. Existing reserved instances keep their price until the end of their term, Techzine reports, but from February 1 new reservations for services covered by savings plans can no longer be exchanged, and a compute savings plan's fixed hourly commitment buys less capacity once underlying rates rise. Gartner's First Take, last updated October 13, tells procurement leaders to reassess cloud commitments, price protections and workload placement.
The regional split matters for resilience designs. Techzine notes that many Dutch organizations run primary workloads in Amsterdam and use Dublin for failover and disaster recovery, so standby costs will rise at nearly twice the rate of production costs. Azure's two UK regions are not on the list.
The CMA moves on Microsoft licensing
On October 16 the CMA proposed designating Microsoft with strategic market status in its business software ecosystem, covering PC operating systems, productivity suites, security software, server operating systems and relational databases. One area it plans to examine is whether customers have effective choice over which cloud they deploy their software licenses on, and how Microsoft's licensing practices affect that choice.
The finding is provisional. The consultation closes at 5pm on November 13, 2026, and the CMA will take a final decision by February 13, 2027. Designation would not establish wrongdoing; it would let the CMA consider targeted interventions such as conduct requirements. Microsoft disputed the assessment and told Reuters its products, including Copilot, are interoperable and can be used alongside competing services, Market Business News reported.
The same day, the CMA reported on its cloud monitoring. It said AWS and Microsoft have connected their data centers with rivals, beginning with Google, removed data transfer fees for customers changing cloud providers, and reduced them for customers using more than one. It has agreed with both to work on identity and access management across clouds and on portable architectures, is keeping a full strategic market status investigation of cloud under review, and will publish another update in spring 2027.
For buyers, licensing is the part with direct cost consequences. The terms for running Windows Server or SQL Server outside Azure feed into what a multi-cloud failover design costs, and those terms are now under formal review.
What to watch
Google's analysis of the europe-west2-b incident is the next document to read. The questions it needs to answer are why services outside the affected zone returned errors, and why customers were told they might not be able to create new workloads during recovery.
The CMA consultation closes on November 13. Azure's regional increases take effect on February 1, 2027, twelve days before the CMA's deadline for a final decision on Microsoft. Until Microsoft publishes a public list, the Service Health advisory in each subscription remains the reference for what changes.