Revolut's 10-Hour Outage Exposes Cloud Dependency Risks Ahead of Potential IPO

Revolut suffered a 10-hour outage last week that left hundreds of thousands of customers unable to withdraw money, transfer funds, or pay by card, raising concerns that the fintech's rapid growth has outpaced basic operational resilience. The disruption, caused by a power issue at a Google Cloud data centre in London, affected 30 of Revolut's core services. The incident comes at a sensitive time for the $115bn-valued company as it pursues a full US banking licence and weighs a potential stock market listing in New York and London. The Bank of England has separately ordered a review of Revolut's product approval processes, according to reports this week. Analysts at S&P Global Ratings, which recently assigned Revolut the best credit rating of any fintech, said its rapid expansion leaves it with "significant exposure" to cyber and regulatory compliance risks. Computer science specialist Alan Woodward noted Revolut relies more heavily on cloud services than traditional lenders, whose core banking systems remain on legacy mainframe infrastructure. Revolut declined to comment.