A Google Cloud Power Problem Knocked Revolut Cards and UK Court Video Offline

Revolut customers across Europe were unable to open the app or pay by card on Tuesday morning, Oct. 20, during a wider internet disruption that appeared to be linked to Google Cloud. Revolut said all customers' money and data were safe, and that its engineers were working on a fix.

Google said the trouble in one of its London-area zones came from a "power event," according to The Independent. The same outage reportedly hit other UK websites and the video system used for court hearings in England and Wales.

What Revolut and Google have said

Revolut posted on X that it was dealing with a service disruption affecting multiple services. The bank apologized to those affected. The Journal and The Next Web both reported that the statement did not name a cause, say how many customers were affected or say when full service would return.

The Journal reported that the disruption is understood to come from a third-party provider outage. Google Cloud had reported problems in its Europe West region, including intermittent network failures.

In a status update quoted by The Independent, Google said the power event caused an outage in its europe-west2-b zone. It said the event itself had been dealt with and that some infrastructure services should partly recover within 30 minutes, with the rest to follow afterward. It did not say what the power event was. The Independent later reported that a follow-up update Google had promised was identical to the one before it, saying multiple services were still having problems.

How widely the outage was felt

The Next Web reported that Downdetector logged more than 1,500 reports early in the morning, a figure that passed 2,000 by 9 a.m. Of those, 63% concerned the app, 20% transfers and 8% logging in. Users in the UK, France, Romania and Spain said they could not move money, and the Irish broadcaster RTÉ reported disruption in Ireland.

Reports differed on how Revolut itself described the problem. The Journal said the company's status page listed 31 services as partially unavailable, including card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and signing in. The Next Web said that at the same time the page showed all services as operational.

Other services were affected as well. The Independent reported problems at the property site Rightmove, and the delivery firm DPD said on its Irish social media pages that it was aware of connection problems with its website. The Cloud Video Platform, which lets defendants, lawyers and others join court hearings remotely, showed an internal server error for much of the morning. The Independent said many hearings were likely delayed or unable to proceed, since the system is often used for defendants in custody.

Why it matters for customers

The Next Web said Revolut says it has more than 80 million personal customers and over 800,000 business customers worldwide, including about 13 million in the UK. Several customers said their cards were declined in shops, which the outlet described as rare during a bank outage. Others said they could not log in, send money or reach support through the in-app chat.

The outage also shows how many unrelated services can depend on the same cloud infrastructure. Pete Membrey, chief research officer at ExpressVPN, told The Independent that banks, government services and retailers often run on the same underlying systems, so a fault in one place can knock out many familiar apps at once.

Both security experts quoted by The Independent urged calm. Membrey said it was too early to name a cause and that people should not assume a cyberattack, since most such outages turn out to be technical faults. He said a banking app that fails is most likely a victim of the outage, not a sign of a problem with the account, and that there is no need to reset passwords or reinstall apps.

Karolis Kaciulis, lead system engineer at Surfshark, warned that scammers can exploit outages by sending messages that impersonate affected companies. He advised checking for updates through a company's official website or app and not sharing passwords, payment details or verification codes through unsolicited links.

What is still unknown

Neither Revolut nor Google has said exactly what triggered the problem, and no firm time for full recovery had been given at the time of the reports. Google said it would continue to update customers on its status page.

Sources: The Independent, The Journal, The Next Web