The prominent financial technology company Revolut experienced a massive technical glitch that disrupted the majority of its digital banking services and applications across various regions of the world, prompting the company to work on resolving the issue and restoring the affected systems.
Nature of the Outage and Field Impacts
Since the technical incident began, the outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded thousands of complaints and reports from users experiencing multiple technical difficulties, which included logging into the app, making card payments, transferring funds between accounts, as well as currency exchange and stock trading services.
The company confirmed in an official statement that the outage affected nearly 28 different services, which were partially classified as unavailable, including the live chat and support service. In contrast, Revolut emphasized that the funds and data of all customers are completely safe and have not been exposed to any security risks.
Potential Link to Cloud Infrastructure
According to news reports published by Reuters, the Revolut outage is believed to be linked to ongoing service disruptions affecting the Google Cloud data center in the British capital, London (europe-west2), following a major power incident that impacted the infrastructure there.
Security Background and Previous Incidents
This technical interruption comes on the heels of the company's disclosure last month of a data leak incident resulting from the sharing of personal information of an unspecified number of customers with a malicious entity impersonating a government agency. Four years ago, the platform suffered another security breach that led to the theft of personal and financial information for more than 50,000 customers.
It is worth noting that Revolut provides banking, administrative, and investment services to more than 80 million customers distributed across more than 160 countries and territories worldwide, including about 800,000 business customers.
What Changes Practically?
For users, this interruption means a temporary halt in completing daily financial transactions via the app and cards, while the incident once again highlights the extent to which major digital financial platforms rely on the stability of the infrastructure of major cloud computing providers.