A Tuesday morning without a credit card. The London region of Google Cloud has been accumulating errors since 8:08 a.m. on October 20. Revolut, the favorite neobank of Sunday crypto traders, therefore displays a red screen on card payments, withdrawals and the application. The scenario also replays identically one year to the day after the AWS outage which brought down Coinbase.
Google Cloud outage: 31 products down in the London area
It all starts at 6:08 UTC on the Google Cloud status page. The message is sober: “several services are experiencing problems in the Europe-West2 region”. Google also talks about “high errors and intermittent network outages”. Then the list of affected products grows longer throughout the morning. It now has 31 entries, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and BigQuery. In other words, virtual machines, databases and storage are affected. That's pretty much everything that runs a banking application.
As of 11:24 a.m. Paris time, Google is still not advancing any cause. The only advice given to customers is to move workloads to another area “if possible”. A next point is then promised for 1 p.m. In the meantime, engineers “continue to investigate”. You know the song.
The collateral damage can be read on Downdetector. Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD and even GOV.UK saw their reports increase between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. However, the London region is not at its first snag. In August 2024, this same Google Cloud outage in London was caused by the simultaneous loss of two power supplies to a point of presence. The result was two hours of latency on load balancers across the region.
Revolut KO, blocked cards and your cryptos behind the window
Revolut first confirmed on X a “service interruption affecting several services”. She then added that “all our customers’ money and data are safe.” Its status page showed most services unavailable or degraded by mid-morning, with card payments and withdrawals from ATMs leading the way. Downdetector also counted more than 1,500 reports shortly after 9 a.m. Paris time.
What about your bitcoins purchased in the app? They sleep in Revolut's vaults, not in a wallet that you control. When the application falls, the “sell” button falls with it. The “remove” button too. A source close to the matter also told Reuters that the Revolut outage stems from the Google Cloud incident. The neobank has not confirmed this publicly. The assets themselves are not at risk, as the storefront is just closed. But for a trader who wanted to exit before the American opening, it amounts to the same thing.
Lloyds, for its part, assured that its application remained accessible despite the peaks in reports. In Germany, ING also reported connection problems with its online banking, without an established link with Google.
Bitcoin does not have a europe-west2 region
While London restarted its servers, the Bitcoin network continued to produce a block approximately every ten minutes. More than 20,000 nodes around the world validate these blocks. Its last interruption dates back to March 2013, an accidental fork resolved in six hours. So there are no suppliers to call or trouble tickets to wait for.
Bitcoin was born from a banking crisis, and it shows
The network was designed precisely for this kind of morning. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto engraved in the very first block the headline of the Times of the day: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. Understand the British chancellor on the verge of a second bank bailout plan. Bitcoin was thus born four months after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Its whitepaper promises in black and white online payments “without going through a financial institution”. Seventeen years later, a neobank with more than 50 million customers no longer validates a bakery payment because a London data center coughed. For bitcoiners, the morning therefore has a taste of revenge. The 2009 title also stands out on X as in every banking crisis.
The contrast has a simple explanation. Three players, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, host almost two-thirds of the world's cloud. Banks and fintechs have therefore moved their application cores there. An area is coughing up in London, and millions of cards are getting stuck in supermarket checkouts. A decentralized network, on the contrary, distributes this risk to each participant.
Let’s be honest, crypto is not immune. Consumer exchanges and wallets also run on AWS or behind Cloudflare. Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood have already verified this to their cost. The difference is that a holder of his own keys can always go through another door.
