The Bank of England conducted a crisis management exercise to test the financial sector's preparedness for a global cloud services outage. The test involved 38 of the U.K.'s largest lenders and market infrastructure operators, highlighting the growing dependence on cloud technology in the financial industry.
The exercise, completed on October 9, 2026, aimed to assess how well these institutions could respond to and manage the disruption caused by a prolonged outage of cloud services. The Bank of England urged participating banks to act on the findings from this test to strengthen their resilience against such scenarios.
The move underscores the critical role of cloud services in modern financial operations and the potential risks associated with their disruption. The findings from this exercise are expected to guide future regulatory measures and industry practices to mitigate these risks.