Yet another Hacker News

31 points paweladamczuk 1 hour ago 9 comments

paweladamczuk 1 hour ago | parent

For me it was Revolut. No access to my main account, no withdrawals, no card payments since the morning. App doesn't work, there's no phone number to call, nobody to talk to. Dark side of neobanking, I guess.

Arbortheus 35 minutes ago | parent

Not all neobanks. I use Monzo, and they had an outage a while back. I was impressed that it barely affected their functionality.

They have a stand-in system that uses a separate codebase and separate cloud provider. They have a blog post about it here: https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.

(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)

I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

ndsipa_pomu 5 minutes ago | parent

> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...

I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.

gentlerain 33 minutes ago | parent

Countries talking about AI sovereignty, when they forgot compute sovereignty

Arbortheus 26 minutes ago | parent

I think sovereignty might be the _cause_ of the banks' outages...

This is affecting companies that put everything into a single GCP region in the UK for their entire business - aka most likely British companies or government with a data sovereignty requirement.

gentlerain 19 minutes ago | parent

That's not sovereignty.

Sovereignty is when there is a UK company with multiple data centres in the country.

With that if one region goes down, another can carry on.

derektank 13 minutes ago | parent

Redundancy does not seem like an inherent component of sovereignty

gadders 15 minutes ago | parent

>>Google cloud outage takes down HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Llyods, Equifax, more

You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.

bcvvvy 6 minutes ago | parent

I bank with HSBC. Everything is up and working.

A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.