Revolut restores services after cloud outage disrupts payments and currency exchange

Revolut said services had been restored on the evening of 20 October after an interruption it attributed to Google Cloud, according to its statement reported by Euronews. The company also said customer money and data had remained safe throughout the disruption.[1]

CNA reported problems with card payments, ATM withdrawals and currency exchange in Singapore. Its checks found all 27 services on the local status page partially unavailable during the evening, with all operational by 06:15 Singapore time on 21 October. Those observations describe that market’s recovery.[2]

Google’s incident record identifies a power event in the London europe-west2-b zone. Converted from its published Pacific timestamps, the incident ran from 06:08 to 14:00 UTC on 20 October: seven hours and 52 minutes. The final update said the problem had been mitigated for most customers while a small number still needed engineering assistance.[3]

That cloud-service interval should not be used as the duration of every interrupted payment or unavailable account. Infrastructure recovery and the restoration of a financial app are different operational milestones. A firm assessing an incident needs to establish which customer functions resumed, whether transactions completed and what remained outstanding; a supplier’s closed incident alone cannot answer those questions.

Revolut’s UK status page showed all systems operational when checked on 21 October, including currency exchange, stock trading, transfers and card payments. This is a published service-status check, rather than a test of individual accounts or transactions.[4]

For brokers and trading businesses, the relevant operational exposure includes the funding route as well as the dealing platform: an available market cannot by itself ensure that a customer can move cash when required. Google says it will publish an incident analysis after completing its investigation, which should provide the next account of the underlying infrastructure failure.[3]

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