Millions of customers of digital bank Revolut found themselves unable to access financial services after a power outage at Google Cloud caused widespread disruption on Tuesday.
Customers across Ireland and the UK reported problems accessing the bank’s systems, from logging in to the app and transferring funds, to making card payments and cash withdrawals.
The disruption was linked to an outage at Google Cloud, which provides core infrastructure services to Revolut.
The problems began early on Tuesday morning and lasted for several hours, with Downdetector recording a spike in reports between 7 and 8am. Revolut confirmed the outage, but moved to reassure customers that their data and money had not been compromised.
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“We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” a spokesman said. “We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”
[ Revolut customers in Ireland affected by ‘third-party’ data breachOpens in new window ]
Revolut has 3.4 million customers in Ireland.
Google later confirmed the problem was caused by a “power event” at Google Cloud’s “Europe-west2-b” region, which knocked services offline early on Tuesday morning and caused intermittent network failures.
“A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated,” Google said. It later updated customers, saying the issue with impacted products had been reduced for most of those affected. “It is believed to be affecting currently a very small number of customers and our engineering team is working on it.”
Revolut was not the only company affected. In the UK, Lloyds Bank and HSBC users were also reporting issues to Downdetector, as well as DPD and the courts video platform used throughout the country.
AIB and Bank of Ireland said they were unaffected, and that all services were operating normally.
Google’s cloud division is competing with rivals Microsoft and AWS in providing cloud services to critical industries. This outage has brought the reliance of companies on a small number of cloud services back into the spotlight.
In October last year, a problem with AWS took down major apps such as Fortnite and Snapchat, along with banks, transport and messaging services. That was followed a week later by an issue at Microsoft Azure after an “inadvertent configuration change” caused problems for users.
