The UK just declared Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle ‘critical’ to its financial system

Britain’s banks run on four American clouds. The Treasury reckons two-thirds of UK firms lean on the same handful. Now the regulators are stepping in.

The UK has named Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle as “critical third parties” to its financial system, as Reuters first reported. The designation takes effect on 13 July. These are the first companies ever named under the regime.

The status pulls the four cloud giants under direct financial oversight for the first time. It applies to four legal entities: Microsoft Ireland Operations, Google Cloud EMEA, Amazon Web Services EMEA and Oracle Corporation UK. It covers only the systemic services they sell into finance.

The trigger is concentration. HM Treasury found that more than 65% of UK organisations rely on the same four providers for their infrastructure. An outage at any one of them, the government warned, could hit many firms at once, with consequences...

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