A major internet outage hit Rightmove on Tuesday, potentially disrupting property searches and enquiries for estate agents across the UK.

A power failure at Google’s London data centres triggered the disruption, causing problems for businesses and public services.

For estate and letting agents advertising properties on Rightmove, the outage raised concerns about whether prospective buyers and tenants could access listings or submit enquiries.

However, the full impact on agents and their customers remains unclear.

Rightmove reportedly restored normal services by Tuesday afternoon.

A Rightmove spokesperson told EYE: “Technical issues affecting Google Cloud Platform across Europe impacted some of our logged-in services. These issues have now been resolved and all services are operating as normal. We thank our customers for their patience while we worked closely with our provider to minimise the impact.”

Google confirms cause of outage

Google attributed the problems to a “power event” at its London data centres.

The company first reported the incident on its europe-west2 service health dashboard at around 7am BST on Tuesday.

The disruption affected numerous websites and applications, including services operated by Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Revolut and delivery firm DPD.

The problems also extended to the NHS app and parts of the court system.

However, Google said most services had recovered by mid-afternoon.

In an update at 3pm BST, the company confirmed that it had “mitigated” the issue for most affected customers.

Nevertheless, a small number of customers continued to experience difficulties at that stage.

Cloud failure disrupts multiple services

The incident highlighted how technical problems at a major technology provider can affect numerous unrelated websites and services.

Google Cloud supplies infrastructure that supports websites, applications and online platforms.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare provide similar technology to businesses worldwide.

Although much of this infrastructure operates behind the scenes, failures can disrupt everyday business activity.

For estate agents, the immediate concern centred on potential interruptions to property marketing and customer enquiries.

While most services recovered on Tuesday, the precise impact on Rightmove listings and agent enquiries remains unknown.