Google Cloud outage hits Revolut payments and currency exchange in Switzerland

Revolut customers in Switzerland experienced problems with payments, deposits and currency exchange on Tuesday, 20 October, after a power supply problem at a Google Cloud data centre near London. Disruption in Switzerland began shortly after 8am. The outage affected banks, businesses and other online services for hours, mainly in Britain but also elsewhere in Europe. By the afternoon, most Google Cloud services were operating normally again, although a full recovery across all affected services had yet to be confirmed.

Revolut assured customers that their money and data were safe. The company said it had been working to resolve the disruption since discovering it that morning and apologised to those affected. That assurance about security did not, however, mean that every function was already available without restrictions.

Payments, transfers and cash withdrawals disrupted

The British digital bank reported difficulties with several core services. Alongside payments and access to balances, the disruption affected cash withdrawals at ATMs, transfers and card top-ups. Problems with currency exchange were also recorded in Switzerland. It remains unclear how many Swiss customers were unable to use each service.

The outage therefore reached well beyond a secondary feature in the app, affecting several ways of moving or accessing money. Customers trying to make a payment, transfer funds or top up a card could encounter difficulties. The available information does not establish that every Revolut customer, or every transaction, was affected equally.

For customers in Switzerland, the combination of payment and currency exchange problems is particularly relevant. Revolut brings these functions together in one application, so disruption can complicate both everyday payments and transactions involving foreign currencies. Whether someone wanted to exchange francs or spend an existing balance, availability depended on which service was working at that point.

That distinction matters when assessing the scale of the interruption. Problems with one function did not necessarily mean that all other ways of using an account were unavailable. Equally, access to one service was not confirmation that the entire app had returned to normal.

A power problem with consequences far beyond London

Google attributed the outage to a power-related incident that caused severe network disruption at its European data centre in the London area. Google Cloud supplies businesses with computing capacity and data storage, among other services. This infrastructure operates behind many applications, even when customers see only their bank’s app or a company’s website.

The consequences consequently extended beyond Revolut. Lloyds experienced problems with its app and online banking, while HSBC customers also reported difficulties gaining access. Royal Mail was among the other affected businesses. Disruption was also reported at property website Rightmove, telecommunications company BT and parcel delivery company DPD.

Public services were caught up in the outage too. In England and Wales, the system used for video links in court hearings remained blocked throughout the morning. The interruption thus affected both commercial services and public functions. Millions of users were affected overall, predominantly in Britain. That wider European impact does not, however, establish how extensive the disruption was within Switzerland.

Restoring infrastructure is not the same as restoring every service

Google initially said the underlying problem had been resolved and services were gradually becoming available again. Customers could nevertheless still encounter difficulties creating new workloads — additional computing tasks or applications running in the cloud. Google initially gave the afternoon as an approximate target for fully restoring existing workloads.

Later, the company said most operations were back to normal. Lloyds also said during the afternoon that the underlying problems had been resolved and that it expected all services to return to normal shortly. A corresponding confirmation covering every Revolut function was not yet available.

For banking customers, this is an important distinction. Once the technical infrastructure is running again, the applications built on it may not become fully available at exactly the same moment. Fixing the cause and restoring each individual function are separate stages of recovery.

Google’s update alone therefore did not establish that payments, transfers and currency exchanges were once again working smoothly everywhere. For affected Revolut users in Switzerland, the relevant question remained whether the particular service they needed had recovered, rather than whether the wider cloud platform was largely operational.

Dependence on shared cloud infrastructure

The outage illustrates how closely digital services are connected across national borders. Customers carrying out their banking in Switzerland can be affected by a technical problem in London. The location of a financial services company is therefore only part of the picture: the infrastructure supporting its products matters too.

In Britain, the government contacted Google, while the Financial Conduct Authority, the financial regulator, requested further information. Beyond restoring access, the incident raises questions about how resilient businesses and institutions are when major cloud providers experience disruption. Shared infrastructure can allow a single technical incident to affect numerous services simultaneously.

Google said it would publish a full report on the incident in the coming days to explain the technical background in greater detail. For affected Swiss Revolut customers, the immediate concern remains when every function will be reliably available again.

Revolut’s assurance that money and data were safe addressed the security question from the bank’s perspective. It did not answer the separate question of whether operations had been fully restored. Until all affected functions were confirmed as working normally, the broad recovery reported by Google could not amount to a complete all-clear for customers.