Tuesday was a tough day to be dependent on Revolut. Customers trying to make card payments as normal were refused. Cash withdrawals were also affected, leaving some people with no access at all to their money. If they were lucky enough to be able to log in to the app, the in-app support was unresponsive, and Revolut does not routinely offer phone support to its customers.
It was, in short, a bit of a disaster for the digital bank. Revolut was quick to reassure people that their money and data were safe, but that didn’t help those who were stranded without a way to pay for travel or buy food.
It would be easy to shrug and say that people should always have a backup. A second bank card with a different financial institution; perhaps some emergency cash just in case (did none of us read the Government’s emergency booklet?) to get us through.
There but for the grace of the tech gods go all of us. The problem wasn’t down to Revolut’s systems, or a cyberattack, but a failure at Google Cloud. The company has made a concerted push into the financial services market as it vies for business with rivals Microsoft and AWS.
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It could have been any bank; this time, it just happened to be Revolut, a relative newcomer to the banking world that is still treated dismissively by some. This is despite the fact that more than 3 million people in Ireland use the digital bank’s services. A good number of those users were lured away from Ireland’s traditional banks, which have been forced to provide better digital services to customers.
And it wasn’t just Revolut that was affected. Although AIB and Bank of Ireland reported no problems with their services, in the UK, Lloyds and HSBC also suffered the effects of the outage. The UK’s courts video system was taken down too.
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The issue that Revolut’s outage raised is not that we should turn away from digital banks; it is the fact that we are overly dependent on a small number of tech systems in every facet of our daily lives. Take out one and the cascade effect is terrifying to behold.
These incidents are relatively rare, but they happen. Ironically, it was a year to the day that a big problem with AWS’s services caused apps such as Fortnite and Snapchat to go dark. That was followed only days later by a Microsoft Azure issue, an “inadvertent configuration change” that not only knocked Microsoft’s own services offline, but also affected airlines, Heathrow airport and even An Post.
They are, in a way, a victim of their own success. If Google, Microsoft, and AWS were not supporting as many of the day-to-day services we use, we wouldn’t notice if the service had a minor blip. But they do and, consequently, when things go wrong, the impact is widespread.
It is not just the infrastructure underpinning these services that is out of our hands. A French judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Nicolas Guillou, found that his access to many of the services we take for granted has been effectively blocked after US president Donald Trump imposed sanctions on him. Travel bookings made through Expedia have been cancelled. His bank account has been restricted, and booking flights or other transport is almost impossible for him.
Imagine if you could not access your email or cloud storage services. How many mobile numbers have you committed to memory, because you know they are stored safely on your phone? How much of your life would be affected if you could no longer use your bank card?
The sanctions, which were imposed on a number of ICC judges and block US entities and their overseas subsidiaries from providing services to him, came following investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine and the issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Imagine if you could not access your email or cloud storage services. How many mobile numbers have you committed to memory, because you know they are stored safely on your phone? How much of your life would be affected if you could no longer use your bank card?
More recently, the reported slowdown of Starlink’s satellite communications system in Ukraine affected the country’s ability to defend itself. Ukraine relies on the system to help intercept Russian missile and drone attacks; speed limits that were imposed last week made that a more difficult task.
According to the Wall Street Journal, that slowdown came at the order of billionaire Elon Musk. Musk appeared to point the finger at the White House, but the US has denied involvement.
Regardless of who was responsible, the end result was the same: a powerful billionaire somewhere put a thumb on the scale and ordinary people suffered the consequences.
These incidents all highlight our precarious position in Europe. Whether it is a concentration of business in a small number of tech firms or the shifting geopolitical landscape, Europe needs to get some sort of control over things.
Proposals published by the European Commission in June set a number of targets to help achieve this, from increasing data centre capacity to supporting chip production. Bureaucracy moves slowly, though, and EU bureaucracy is a particular behemoth. The targets set are still a good way off, and Europe is starting from behind.
The alternative, though, is throwing up our hands and giving up. To adapt a phrase, the best time to start developing tech sovereignty was yesterday; the second best time is now.
Europe needs alternatives, and it needs them fast.
