Revolut outage blocks banking for millions after Google Cloud failure

Who is affected

Revolut, a major fintech company, was hit by a global outage that disrupted its online banking services for millions of customers. According to BleepingComputer↗ (opens in a new tab), Revolut serves over 80 million users in more than 160 countries, including 800,000 business customers. The outage also impacted ING Germany, which reported problems with online banking and its mobile app, though ING has not confirmed a link to the same cause. The disruption was not limited to a single country, as customers worldwide reported issues accessing their accounts, making payments, or transferring funds.

How the attack worked

This was not a cyberattack but a technical outage. The cause was traced to a power event at Google Cloud’s main London data centre (europe-west2), as reported by Security Affairs↗ (opens in a new tab). Google Cloud services in the region went offline, which directly affected Revolut’s ability to provide banking services. Revolut’s status page listed 28 affected services, including sign-ins, card payments, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange, stock trading, and live support chat. For a digital-only bank like Revolut, which has no physical branches, this meant customers had no alternative way to access their money or banking services while the outage lasted.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was directly linked to the Google Cloud disruption. Google’s engineering team began investigating the issue, but at first, there was no clear timeline for when services would be restored. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) did not immediately provide further details.

The response

Revolut acknowledged the outage on its status page and social media, stating, “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe.” The company apologised for the inconvenience and said it had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified on Tuesday morning. By the afternoon, Revolut updated customers to say that all services had been restored and that no customer funds or data had been compromised during the incident.

Google Cloud also confirmed service disruptions in its London region but did not immediately provide a detailed explanation. The incident highlights how dependent financial services have become on a small number of cloud providers. When a major data centre fails, the impact can cascade across multiple banks and fintech firms.

What you should do

For customers, there was little to do during the outage except wait for services to return. Revolut assured users that their money and personal data were never at risk. For businesses and IT teams, the incident is a reminder to review cloud dependency and consider backup plans for critical services. Banks and fintechs relying on a single cloud region may want to explore multi-region or multi-cloud strategies to reduce the risk of a single point of failure causing widespread disruption.

Has this happened before?

Revolut has experienced security incidents in the past, including a data breach last month where personally identifiable information was shared with a threat actor impersonating a government agency, and a 2022 breach affecting over 50,000 customers. However, the current outage was not a breach but a technical failure of cloud infrastructure. The incident still raises questions about resilience and business continuity for digital-first banks.