Yesterday there was a problem with the Revolut online bank and was actually a widespread outage for other companies as well and not solely a Revolut issue. Google cloud services had an outage which disrupted courts, HSBC, Lloyds Bank and Revolut. In total 36 major businesses including data centers were affected and Google only offers credit with no compensation.
I was blissfully unaware of this outage which effected the Europe West 2 B Zone. This was basically the entire day starting at 7 am UK time so 8 am my time in SA and services were coming back online after 3pm so 4pm here in SA. I never visited the shops yesterday so that was a stroke of luck as I rarely carry any back up bank cards for our other bank account.
A Quick Apology And Update
This would have affected myself as my account is UK based and Revolut is based in Central London so all their services come from one site. It does not matter where you are in the world if the app runs from a centraised service and is a massive weakness in the entire operating system. This is an eye opener as all of these institutions are reliant on one service and if that service goes down they are all out of action.
Lloyds and Halifax experienced an outage exactly one year ago on the same day which must have made Lloyds move to Google to avoid these issues and here they are again.
Last years outage with AWS saw companies affected receiving roughly 8% in compensation with some companies reimbursed between 10 and 100% of their monthly cloud storage costs. The problem is an entire day lost with down time is only part of the losses as banks cannot earn on no transactions which would be in the millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The real terms in losses is anywhere between $1 million and $5 million per hour so yesterdays outage of 8-10 hours was costly yet Google does not compensate the lost business. The problem is down time for engineering staff which then have to catch this time back up and this bill would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars price tag.
The exposure for every hour lost has a direct impact as those clients will not necessarily remain with that cloud service provider and yesterdays Google outage will historically mean that around 2% of clients will leave for another service provider.
Some interesting stats on Google Cloud is in 2025 this business generated $58.7 billion in revenue. This averages out at $160.8 million per day or $6.7 million per hour globally with no figures publicly available per region. The growth is mind blowing with an estimated 82% year on year growth with revenue just in Q2 this year surpassing $24 billion and on track for a $100 billion revenue in 2026.
The growth is significant with demand growing with companies needing infrastructure and solutions for AI. Growth is expected to stay on this type of trajectory which is revealing where companies are now investing in their own systems.