Revolut goes down in several countries during a Google Cloud outage in London

Revolut spent Tuesday morning, October 20, with most of its services down. Customers reported they could not log into the app, pay by card, make transfers or withdraw cash. According to BleepingComputer, the bank's status page listed 28 affected services, including currency exchange, stock trading and support chat. Complaints came from Spain, the UK and France.

In a post on X, Revolut confirmed “a service disruption affecting multiple services,” said customers' money and data “are safe” and apologized. The bank did not explain the cause.

Where Google Cloud comes in

Over the same period, Google Cloud logged an incident in its europe-west2 region, in London, starting at 06:08 UTC (2:08 a.m. ET). Google's official status page lists 38 affected products, from virtual machines to databases, with elevated errors and intermittent network failures. At 11:12 UTC, Google said a “power event” had taken down one of the region's zones (europe-west2-b), that power had been restored and that services would recover gradually.

Irish broadcaster RTÉ reports that the Revolut outage is linked to the Google Cloud incident. Neither Google nor Revolut had confirmed that link at the time of publication. According to The Register, Downdetector also showed complaints about other UK services, such as Lloyds Bank and HSBC, without confirmation from the companies.

Why one outage hits so many people

Digital banks and fintechs usually rent infrastructure from the big clouds (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) instead of running their own data centers. That makes services cheaper and faster to build, but it creates a single point of dependence: when a cloud region fails and the system does not fail over in time, millions of customers feel it at once. Google itself advised affected customers to move workloads to another zone or region.

If Revolut is your main account, the practical lesson is to keep a second payment method on hand. Also be wary of messages that show up during outages asking for passwords, codes or “data confirmation”: the bank has only said it is working to restore service.