Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority gained powers to directly regulate four major cloud and tech providers to UK banks, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, and Microsoft, starting Monday. Regulators designated the four as ‘critical third parties,’ requiring them to run stress tests and report major incidents like cyberattacks, outages, and natural disasters. Banks now lean on these providers for data storage, fraud detection, and digital services, and an October outage at Amazon’s cloud disrupted more than 2,000 companies, including Lloyds Banking Group. UK ministers drew criticism for taking 18 months to name the firms, and the Treasury committee chair said AI providers may need the same oversight next.
