• Multiple banking apps in the UK, including Revolut, faced disruptions on Tuesday morning.
• Google Cloud experienced issues with its London-based cloud region and has since said services are coming back.
• Revolut said in a statement that customers' money was safe while it investigated the disruption.

Google said it had largely resolved a cloud outage that appeared to knock out a number of online banking services.

The company said in an update at around 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday that the problem had been mitigated for the most part, with "a very small number" of customers still experiencing issues.

Google had said the outage had been caused by a "power event" at its europe-west2-b zone, which is based in London.

A handful of banking apps and services, including Halifax and Revolut, reported issues on Tuesday that coincided with Google Cloud's disruptions. Some companies said that the Google Cloud outage was the cause, while others attributed it to an unnamed third-party provider.

Users of some affected banking apps said in social media posts early Tuesday that they couldn't make card payments, log in to the app, or transfer money.

"We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe. We've been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologize to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused," Revolut said in a statement earlier in the day. The outage was due to Google Cloud, a person familiar with the matter said.

"We're aware some customers are having issues with our app and online. We're sorry about this and are working hard to fix it," Halifax posted on X.

Emma, a popular UK budgeting app, also reported outages on Tuesday. "Emma is currently down due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7 a.m. This is a technical outage, not a security issue," the company said on X.

Some took to X to share how the outage was disrupting their lives. One person said they'd had to cancel their beauty appointments in Japan, and another said their card was declined at the airport and they couldn't reach the support team.

The outage appears to have affected non-finance companies, too, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks online service disruptions.

Earlier on Tuesday, an X account for DPD, a delivery service, said in a post that its website was affected, and the web-hosting platform SiteGround said the outage has hit its UK data center. SiteGround said in its post that its engineers were working with Google Cloud engineers to address the issue.

The UK's courts and tribunal service said that it was experiencing issues with its cloud-based video tools for remote hearings on Tuesday. "We're working with our technology partners to restore service," an account for the government service wrote in an X post.

The Google Cloud outage comes as the tech giant has competed with Amazon and Microsoft to win business from enterprises, startups, and governments, particularly amid the AI boom. Reliability is a big promise built into these deals, as outages can have costly consequences for customers.

Google is not alone in being affected by outages, though: Amazon, Microsoft, and others have suffered downtime this year.

• Google is injecting more AI into the interview process.
• The company has been testing a new format that tests candidates on their AI fluency.
• The pilot has recently rolled out more broadly across Google, internal docs show.

AI is changing how Google employees work — and how Google hires them.

The company has been testing several AI-related changes to its hiring process for software engineers, according to documents reviewed by Business Insider. These changes, which Google has been rolling out in phases throughout this year, include allowing the use of AI in coding interviews and permitting interviewers to use Gemini to give candidates feedback.

Many engineers are also now expected to show some degree of AI fluency as a bare minimum, the documents show.

In May, Business Insider reported that Google was piloting ways to integrate AI into the interview process with a small handful of orgs. This included a new "code comprehension" interview in which candidates are assessed on AI fluency and prompt engineering. Candidates can also use Google's Gemini AI as an assistant during the interview.

The new formats have since been rolled out more broadly across the company, according to the internal documents. However, a spokesperson said they were still considered to be in the pilot phase for now.

"We're piloting updates to our interview process for software engineers, including evaluating for AI fluency, to be more reflective of how our teams are operating," Brian Ong, vice president of recruiting at Google, told Business Insider in a statement.

Like other companies, Google is adapting its hiring process to keep pace with the huge transformation AI is having on software engineering. As developers increasingly rely on AI coding assistants, hiring companies want to know how competent they are with these tools.

In April, Google said that three-quarters of new code created at the company is generated by AI and reviewed by humans, a trend that has since continued across the tech industry. Google has said that its employees are increasingly using the company's own Gemini models to both improve other Google products and to build the next generation of Gemini.

The documents say that for some roles, including software engineering, AI fluency and AI product integration are now used as measures of a candidate's abilities. A Google spokesperson said that AI fluency is a requirement for all software engineering jobs, while AI product integration is required for most roles outside entry-level positions.

Google is also piloting the use of Gemini for interview transcription and note-taking in some job interviews conducted via the company's videoconferencing platform, Google Meet, one document shows.

Google wants to speed up the feedback process using AI, too. The same document states that Google is working to enable interviewers to use Gemini to draft role-tailored feedback.

As Google builds out this new interview system, employees were told they may be asked to participate in some of the pilots — but were warned against using AI tools to generate their own interviewing "solutions."

"Do not use GenAI or LLMs to create your own standalone solutions or agents for hiring or interviewing use cases," the document states, referring to large language models.

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