Outage shows danger of growing reliance on small number of big companies for our digital infrastructure, say experts

It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.

The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of over a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients.

Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant

The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.