Revolut customers encountered failed card payments and problems accessing banking services on Tuesday, 20 October, during disruption linked to Google Cloud. Card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and account sign-in were among the services affected, according to reporting by The Independent.
Revolut's services were back to normal by the time of the status check on 21 October, with its UK dashboard showing all systems operational. Google also said its cloud issues had been resolved.
Business Insider linked Revolut's disruption to Google Cloud through a person familiar with the matter. Google's incident record describes a power-related outage in its London infrastructure.
Customers Report Failed Payments and Lost Access
The disruption reached people trying to make everyday payments. Business Insider reported social-media accounts from affected banking customers, including one who said their card was declined at an airport and they could not reach support.
Another described cancelling beauty appointments in Japan. These accounts illustrate the practical consequences reported during the outage, although they do not establish how many customers experienced similar problems.
The affected functions also extended beyond shopping. Problems with cash withdrawals, transfers and signing in meant customers could encounter difficulties using different parts of their accounts, rather than a single broken feature.
'We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe', a Revolut spokesperson said in a statement reproduced by The Independent. The company said it had been working on the disruption since identifying it that morning and apologised to those affected.
That assurance addressed the safety of funds and information. Customers' reported difficulties concerned their ability to use services when they needed them.
A London Cloud Failure Reaches Banking Services
Google traced the incident to a power problem in europe-west2-b, a zone within its London cloud region. Its dashboard records the start at 7:08am BST on Tuesday, with services unavailable in that zone and some services elsewhere in the region experiencing errors and intermittent network problems.
Other financial services reported difficulties that morning. Budgeting app Emma explicitly attributed its outage to Google Cloud, while Halifax acknowledged problems with its app and online services without naming Google in the statement reproduced in the reporting.
The connection matters because the service a customer sees can depend on systems operated by another company. A failure underneath those services can therefore reach beyond the cloud provider's own products.
'A problem in a single cloud region can therefore propagate through an entire digital supply chain, affecting organisations that are several layers removed from the original outage', Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer-science lecturer at Keele University, told The Register.
Google's updates show recovery happening in stages. After reporting that the power problem had been mitigated, it prioritised restoring existing workloads and warned that customers might still be unable to create new ones.
By 1:10pm BST, most workloads were recovering. An update at 3:03pm said the disruption had been mitigated for most customers, but a very small number remained affected. Those infrastructure milestones do not provide a precise restoration time for every banking service.
Regulators Seek Answers After Services Recover
The response continued beyond the technical recovery. The Financial Conduct Authority confirmed it was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the impact, according to The Telegraph.
The newspaper also reported that Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Treasury select committee, wrote to Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey and FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi. She sought explanations of their response and the steps they would take following the disruption.
The oversight extends beyond individual banks. The report says the Treasury designated Google Cloud and other major providers as critical third parties in July, bringing their work with financial firms under regulatory supervision.
For customers, the immediate concern remained whether they could use their accounts and what firms would do about the disruption. An FCA spokesperson said: 'People need to be able to access their money and make payments, so we expect firms to fix issues quickly, keep their customers informed and ensure no one is left out of pocket.'
