Revolut's 80 million customers got a reminder on Tuesday that digital banks run on someone else's computers. The fintech's app stopped loading, card payments failed at checkout counters, and ATM withdrawals refused to process. The outage hit during morning rush hours across the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Romania, and Greece.
"We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services," the company wrote on X. "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe. We've been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused."
Revolut did not name the cause. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the outage was tied to problems at Google Cloud.
Google's London Zone Went Dark at 6:08 AM
Google Cloud's status page confirmed issues in its europe-west2 region, which runs from data centers in London. The incident began at 06:08 UTC. Google's own service health dashboard eventually listed 36 services experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures.
"Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region," the company posted. Its engineering team was investigating.
Google suggested that customers could try migrating workloads to other cloud regions "if feasible." That advice is of limited use to a bank mid-outage. Financial services often cannot move infrastructure on the fly because of data residency rules and regulatory requirements that dictate where customer information must physically reside.
The ripple effects spread beyond Revolut. Downdetector logged hundreds of reports affecting Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Rightmove, and Royal Mail. ING Germany separately reported login problems. Reddit threads filled with system administrators describing downed virtual machines in the europe-west2-b availability zone while other zones in the same region stayed online.
Five Hours Without Cards
Bank outages usually leave mobile apps broken while cards keep working. This one disabled both. Customers across Europe found their Revolut cards declined at physical point-of-sale terminals, an unusual failure mode that suggests the infrastructure handling payment authorization was itself dependent on the affected cloud services.
By mid-morning, Revolut's own status page listed 31 services as partially unavailable: card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, premium features, and account logins.
Frustration built as the outage stretched past five hours with no fix in sight. The company's last public update remained the statement it posted at 8:54 AM.
A Rough Month for Revolut Security
The outage compounds what has already been a difficult stretch. In September, Revolut confirmed it had handed over customer data including passports, selfies, and transaction histories to criminals who impersonated a government agency using a legitimate official email domain. Italy's government later told parliament that the incident involved 680 customers. Days later, US brokerage DriveWealth disclosed a separate breach affecting Revolut customers who had traded US stocks through the platform.
Revolut's CEO for Western Europe told BFM TV earlier this month that the company would cover the cost of replacing identity documents for affected customers.
The company has grown rapidly. It passed 70 million customers in January and now claims more than 80 million, putting it in range of JPMorgan's 84 million accounts. In the UK alone, Revolut has 13 million customers. Ireland has 3.4 million. The scale means an outage of this kind touches a meaningful slice of daily commerce across multiple countries.
As of early afternoon UK time, Google had not disclosed what caused the London region failures or offered a timeline for full restoration. The europe-west2 region has three availability zones designed to protect against localized hardware failures. One of them, europe-west2-b, appears to have taken most of the impact.
Revolut has not confirmed whether Google Cloud was the cause or when it expects services to return.
