An Outage That Stopped Cards and ATMs Across Europe for Hours
On 20 October 2026, shortly after 8:00 Polish time, a power failure at a third-party facility serving Google Cloud's europe-west2-b zone in London triggered an outage. The effect was immediate and hit 38 cloud products that thousands of companies across Europe rely on, including several financial institutions. For millions of customers, that meant something very concrete: a banking app that suddenly stopped working in the middle of a workday, a card declined at the checkout, and an ATM that refused to dispense cash.
Who Was Hit and How Long It Lasted
The most visibly affected was Revolut, a fintech with millions of users, including in Poland. The app showed a generic error, cards were declined both in stores and online, and transfers stalled. Reports of problems also came in from Polish Revolut customers. UK lenders HSBC and Lloyds Bank reported issues too, and disruption reportedly spread across all 38 affected Google Cloud products, from banking services to court systems and courier networks. Google said the cause was a power failure at a third-party facility serving the europe-west2 region. The incident lasted from 06:08 to 14:00 UTC, just under eight hours, and the company said it would publish a detailed analysis once its internal investigation was complete.
Regulators Are Already Reacting
Europe's Banking Watchdog Asks Google What Went Wrong
On 21 October, just a day after the incident, Reuters reported that the European Banking Authority (EBA) had contacted Google Cloud to establish the details of the outage and assess its impact on financial institutions operating in the EU. This was no routine courtesy exchange: Reuters described the whole situation as the first major test of the EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which is meant to force banks and their technology suppliers to be better prepared for exactly this kind of scenario.
Poland's Regulator Reminds Banks of Their Duties Toward IT Vendors
Interestingly, a day earlier, on 19 October, Poland's Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) had published its own recommendations for financial market entities on reviewing the security of SaaS services and managing risk from ICT vendors. These are not a direct response to the Google Cloud outage, since they were published a day before it happened, but they show that the risk tied to external technology providers was already on the regulator's radar before it painfully materialized. Among other things, KNF recommends that banks take inventory of the services and data entrusted to vendors, verify their security certifications, review technical accounts and access rights, enforce multi-factor authentication for administrative accounts, assess subcontractor risk, minimize the scope of data shared, test business-continuity procedures for incidents, and cooperate with KNF's CSIRT team. For entities covered by the EU's DORA regulation, some of these actions are no longer just best practice, they are a formal legal obligation.
What This Means for Your Money
Your Money Is Safe, Even When the App Is Not Working
The most important point for any customer is simple: a cloud provider's technical outage is not the same as losing your money. Revolut's spokesperson confirmed that all customers' funds and data remained safe throughout the incident, and that the problem was purely about access to services, not the money itself sitting in accounts. That distinction matters: your balance did not disappear and was not compromised, you simply could not reach it through one specific channel for a few hours. That is exactly why panicking, rushing to transfer money elsewhere, or calling phone numbers from suspicious messages circulating on social media makes no sense in this kind of situation.
Watch Out for Scammers Exploiting the Chaos
Cybersecurity experts quoted in coverage of the outage warned plainly: incidents like this are a great opportunity for criminals who impersonate a bank or fintech and send fake messages with links to "log in immediately and verify your account." The rule is always the same: no bank ever asks for your full login details, an SMS code, or a card number by email or text message, even in the context of a real outage. If you want to check whether a service is genuinely down, do it through the official app or a website address you type from memory, not through a link in an unsolicited message.
The Bigger Lesson for Digital Banking Customers
This outage is a good reminder of how heavily modern banking, whether through a traditional bank or a fintech like Revolut, depends on external cloud infrastructure. Google, Amazon and Microsoft now sit behind the scenes of a huge share of Europe's financial systems, and a single power failure in one London data centre can bring card payments to a halt in shops in entirely different countries within minutes. That is exactly why regulators, both the EU's EBA and Poland's KNF, are pushing banks harder to have a real backup plan for these situations, not just documentation on paper.
For a customer, the practical takeaway is that it is worth having more than one way to reach your money. If your entire financial life depends on a single app from a single fintech, that provider's cloud outage can cut you off from cash for several hours at the worst possible moment, say, at a store checkout or a petrol station.
What You Should Do
Instead of waiting for the next outage, it is worth reviewing your own setup now:
- Do not keep all your funds and payment methods in one place, especially if you mainly rely on a fintech that only works through a mobile app. A backup card from a different bank is a simple insurance policy against an outage.
- If you are considering a second, backup account, check the current ranking of personal accounts and pick an institution with a well-reviewed, stable app and convenient access to a branch or helpline in case of technical problems.
- Keep a portion of larger sums somewhere you do not need to access every minute, for example in a savings account or a term deposit at a bank covered by deposit guarantees. An app outage does not change the fact that this money stays safe and waiting on the terms you agreed to.
- During a real outage, use only the channels you know from memory: the official app, a website address you type yourself into the browser, or the helpline number printed on the back of your card. Ignore links and phone numbers sent in messages you receive during the chaos.
- Remember that your balance does not depend on whether you can log in right now. If you are worried about a specific transaction, wait for the service to come back and check your transaction history instead of acting out of panic.
The 20 October outage is a reminder that the safety of your money at a bank is not only about a high interest rate or low fees, it is also about the technical resilience of the institution you use. Before deciding where to keep your savings, compare not just the rates but also service stability: start by checking current savings account offers on BankSorter and build yourself a financial backup plan before you actually need one.