Google Cloud London Outage Disrupts Revolut Cards

A power failure in Google Cloud’s London region on Oct. 20 disrupted Revolut card payments and transfers for hours, according to BleepingComputer.

For readers of Ecommerce Paradise, the point is simple. If your ad cards, supplier payments, payouts and VA payroll all sit with one provider, one bad morning can stall a high-ticket store while orders keep arriving.

Below: what was reported, how it compares with Google’s 2024 Frankfurt power failure, what I’d change in a store’s money setup, and six fixes you can finish this week. If you are new to the model, start with my guide to high-ticket dropshipping.

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Google Cloud London Power Event Disrupts Revolut and UK Banks

Google Cloud’s status page began logging problems in europe-west2, its London region, at 06:08 GMT on Tuesday, Quartz reported. Google later pinned the failure on “a power event” in one of the region’s zones, europe-west2-b, according to the timeline UptimeRobot published. UptimeRobot’s log puts that statement at 11:12 UTC.

Revolut took the heaviest hit. Card payments, money transfers, cash machine withdrawals, currency swaps and share trading were all disrupted, per the Wall Street Journal as relayed by Quartz. A Revolut spokesperson told the WSJ: “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” and added that customers’ money and data were safe.

The size of the disruption depends on who is counting. Revolut’s status page listed 28 affected services in BleepingComputer’s report. UptimeRobot counted 30 services partially unavailable at 10:08 UTC. Both numbers describe the same morning at different moments.

The link between Google and Revolut was not confirmed at first. Reuters reported, per Quartz, that a person familiar with the matter tied the outage to the Google Cloud disruption. Later on Tuesday, according to an update BleepingComputer added at 13:52 EDT, Revolut itself pointed to the Google Cloud incident, said the issue was fixed and said services were restored.

Other firms reported trouble too. Halifax customers had problems with the app and online banking, ABC News Australia reported. A Lloyds spokesperson told the WSJ: “We are aware of similar issues affecting other organizations and are monitoring the situation closely.” Bloomberg reported that HSBC and NatWest also had problems, and neither bank had responded to its questions.

The UK Courts and Tribunals Service said a video platform used for remote hearings was affected, per ABC. British media also reported trouble at Royal Mail, Microsoft and DPD, but ABC said it could not confirm those were caused by Google. Treat those three as unverified.

Google’s updates arrived on a delay. UptimeRobot says Google’s first update came about 2.5 hours after errors began, at 08:35 UTC, and that the company marked the issue mitigated for most customers at 14:00 UTC, roughly 7 hours 52 minutes after it started. A small number of customers were still affected at that point, and 38 Google Cloud products were listed as impacted by midday. Bloomberg reported, per Quartz, that Google told customers to move workloads to other regions “if feasible.” ABC reports Google will publish an analysis once its internal investigation ends. That report did not exist when I wrote this.

Scale matters here. Revolut serves more than 80 million customers in over 160 countries and regions, including 800,000 business customers, per BleepingComputer. That report does not say whether Revolut Business accounts were affected, so I won’t claim they were.

Google’s 2024 Frankfurt Power Outage Set the Precedent

This is not Google’s first European power failure. On Oct. 24, 2024, a power failure and cooling problem shut down parts of the europe-west3-c zone in Frankfurt, and The Register reported the incident ran 12 hours and 39 minutes, from 02:30 to 15:09 local time.

The communication pattern looks familiar. In Frankfurt, Google first notified users 26 minutes after the outage began and offered no workaround until almost three hours in, per The Register. In London, UptimeRobot’s timeline shows a first update about 2.5 hours after errors began. Both times the advice was to move to other zones or regions.

Google’s defense of zone design is worth stating fairly. After Frankfurt, Google said “less than one percent of the operations that touch instance and disk resources experienced internal errors” outside the failed zone, per The Register. That statement implies a single-zone fault should stay in one zone. The London morning shows the fault can still reach customers who built on one zone or region.

Two European power events in two years is not a trend. It is a reminder that data centers are buildings with power and cooling, and buildings fail. The sources also disagree on small details, such as the 28 versus 30 service count and the exact mitigation times, so I’ve attributed each figure to its source.

None of the coverage I reviewed names Shopify Payments, Stripe or PayPal as affected. I covered that processor side of the risk in my breakdown of why your payment processor is a single point of failure. This outage hit the banking layer instead, which many store owners forget to include in their backup plan.

What a One-Zone Failure Does to a Store Running on One Bank

My read: the outage itself matters less than what it exposed. Most store owners have thought about the processor. Far fewer have thought about the account the processor pays into, the card that pays Google Ads and the account that pays suppliers.

Here is hypothetical math, not a reported figure. Say a high-ticket store ships 12 orders a day with $2,000 in supplier cost per order. That is $24,000 a day in supplier payments waiting on one account. If that account cannot send money for six hours, the suppliers who ship only after payment hold your orders until the morning. A customer who paid you $2,500 does not care that your bank’s cloud provider lost power.

Ad spend has the same shape. If the card behind your Google Ads or Meta account is declined, campaigns can stall until billing clears, depending on how your account is set up. On a $1,000-a-day budget, a lost morning during a peak sales window costs you the traffic you were about to buy. My guide on turning Google Shopping clicks into sales covers why those hours matter for high-ticket categories.

Location-independent owners carry extra exposure. If you are abroad and your main card fails, replacing it is not a trip to a branch. Many nomad operators lean on neobanks like Revolut for good reasons: low foreign exchange costs and fast setup. Those reasons do not make it a safe place to keep every dollar and every payment route.

The same logic applies to your paper trail. A stable business address for filings and mail keeps your accounts verifiable when you move countries, and I explained the options in my guide to getting a business address without renting an office.

Here is how I’d scale the response by store size. These thresholds are my opinion, not a rule.

Under about $30,000 a month in revenue, two accounts at two different providers and two cards on two different networks cover most of the risk. You do not need a treasury department. You need a second place to send and receive money. My comparison of Wise versus Revolut shows how the two behave for store owners.

Between $30,000 and $150,000 a month, add a second payout path and a documented plan. Wise handles multi-currency balances well. Airwallex does the same for cross-border stores.

I wrote a full walkthrough on setting up Airwallex for a cross-border high-ticket store. A US business account such as Mercury gives you a domestic anchor, and I covered the full Mercury application walkthrough in its own guide.

Cost is the usual objection to a second account. My note on what Mercury’s $0 banking actually costs a store shows what the extra account costs, so you can weigh it against a lost morning of orders.

Above $150,000 a month, treat money movement like inventory. Know the maximum number of hours you can run on each rail. Keep at least one rail, such as Payoneer, that does not share a provider with the other two, and reconcile every rail weekly so a failure does not hide in your books. A tool like Finaloop helps with that reconciliation.

The communication gap is the part I’d copy in reverse. UptimeRobot says Revolut posted about a disruption on X at 07:54 UTC, 41 minutes before Google’s first update, and then posted nothing further there for hours. UptimeRobot, which sells monitoring and so has a stake in the point, argues that even short updates on what is broken and when the next update arrives help businesses decide what to do.

Your customers are in the same position when an order is delayed. If a supplier payment is stuck, send the email at hour one, not hour eight. My expectation is that a buyer who paid $2,500 tolerates a delay better than silence, and a clear message also lowers the odds of a dispute, which is the subject of my chargeback prevention guide for high-ticket stores.

Counterpoint, because it exists. This was a few hours, Revolut said funds were safe throughout, and most owners lost nothing but time. If you bank with a large US institution and use Shopify Payments, your live risk from this specific event was probably small. My point is the next event may not hit the same layer. A separate rail costs little and the first outage you survive pays for it.

A mixed setup also helps with a different problem: ad platforms and suppliers who want a card on file. A business card from a different issuer works as the third leg. My business credit card picks cover which ones suit ad spend and travel. The guide to an e-commerce business continuity plan shows how to document the fallback so a VA can run it at 6 a.m. while you sleep.

If you would rather hand the whole build to a team, that is what the turnkey done-for-you service exists for: a high-ticket store built and run with the operational basics handled.

A store that survives a bad Tuesday is a store you can scale. Want my team to scale the one you already have, with the payment and supplier plumbing sorted? See the scaling service →

Six Money-Rail Fixes to Make Before the Next Cloud Outage

Do these six this week. None needs a developer.

Map every rail. List each place money enters or leaves: processor payouts, bank accounts, ad cards, supplier payments, VA payroll and subscriptions. Mark which ones share a provider. If three or more share one, that provider is your weak point.
Open a second account at a different provider. Pick one that does not run the same way as your first. Wise or Airwallex suit cross-border stores. My guide on Shopify Balance paying overseas suppliers shows another route if you sell on Shopify.
Put a backup card on every ad platform and supplier account. Use a card from a different issuer and a different network than the primary. Check the billing page in Google Ads and Meta today, not during the outage.
Add monitoring that sits outside your provider. UptimeRobot’s own write-up says status pages can lag behind what customers see. My comparison of uptime monitoring tools for ecommerce stores lists options. The UptimeRobot versus Better Stack breakdown helps you pick.
Check where your store is hosted. If you run WooCommerce on a cloud server, find out which region and zone it uses and whether you keep snapshots elsewhere. A host like Cloudways lets you pick a data center at launch, so confirm yours in the dashboard before you need to move. My WooCommerce dropshipping setup guide covers the stack.
Write the outage email before you need it. Draft a short customer notice and load it into Klaviyo as a ready-to-send template. If you want a second set of eyes on the full plan, book a discovery call.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Revolut hacked in the Oct. 20 outage?
No source I read describes a hack. BleepingComputer reports Revolut tied the disruption to a Google Cloud incident and said customer money and data were safe. The same report notes Revolut disclosed a separate data breach last month.

Did the Google Cloud outage affect Shopify stores?
None of the coverage I reviewed names Shopify as affected. The reported impact fell on Revolut, UK banks and some public services. Check your own app list, since a third-party app on an affected cloud region could still have failed.

How long did the outage last?
Google’s problems began at 06:08 UTC and were marked mitigated for most customers at 14:00 UTC, per UptimeRobot, with a small number still affected. Revolut said later in the day that services were restored, per BleepingComputer.

Should I stop using Revolut?
Not on one outage. Keep it as one rail, not the only one. My Wise versus PayPal comparison shows how a second payment path changes holds and fees for a store owner.

What should I do if my processor goes down instead?
Have a second processor approved and tested before you need it. My chargeback prevention guide for high-ticket stores also explains why clean records matter when you add a processor in a hurry.

Where do I start if I’m just launching a store?
Pick a niche first. Start with my free niches list. Then work through the 150+ high-ticket niches guide before you spend on a store.

Want 1-on-1 help finding the single points of failure in your own store? Get the coaching details →

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Trevor Fenner

Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.