Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicallee | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean when Nikolay uses the title and language,

>No excuses — we let you down

>An apology from the Founder & CEO of Revolut

>The last 24 hours have been painful to say the least. Painful for our engineers who have been working around the clock to resolve the issue, but even more painful for our customers who have been unable use their accounts.

and

>You will get no excuses from me.

and

>We have let you down and I take full responsibility for what happened.

for what is essentially a very minor brief issue. He says:

>I would like to reassure you that all personal data and customer funds were completely secure at all times.

So I would like your help interpreting why he uses such completely inappropriate and over-the-top apology language for what amounts to brief [Edit: 1 day of] downtime.

What is your take? Why is it written like this?

View on HN

Brief downtime?

Revolut positions itself as a full service bank, including account number and sort code - they will have users that understandably use their product as their primary account. There will be regular users that will be unable to pay for lunch, and business users that will be unable to pay employees and suppliers (don't forget that it was last Friday of the month, a common payday in the UK). To let their customers go without access to their funds for an entire working day is not a 'brief downtime', it's completely catastrophic.

I'm also not surprised that user's did not hear back from support. I was formally a Revolut premium user that used the 'premium support', and they frequently had support response times >4 hours (one time over >6 hours). It's no surprise that when something serious happens their support infrastructure completely collapsed.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt over their downtime, but I struggle to understand how it took them an entire working day to realise that an application server was playing up, and why a single server was able to take down up to 75% of their transaction processing?

Lastly, if there is anyone out there considering Revolut, please be aware that despite their advertising that they do not add FX fees they actually do add fees on the weekend: https://community.revolut.com/t/weekend-exchange-rate-surcha...

So for why I needed help understanding the tone, I think I read too many crypto exchange announcements, where this kind of apology usually accompanies "we lost everyone's money. we're shutting down." That's why it seemed strange to me.

The title "there is NO excuse for 1 day of downtime" just seems so superlative to me.

It just seems to me that this is just an inconvenience. You yourself use the word "frequently" to describe the frustration you felt. a singe occurrence once doesn't seem like a catastrophe to me, though another respondent told me that it was.

For me, I don't consider it catastrophic if I can't access banking for 1 day. At any rate, thanks for the responses. It's clear some people consider this catastrophic.

For 14 hours or so people couldn't access their funds. That's the sort of error that can easily be enough to sever ones relationship to a company, depending on individual context.

Revolut is a banking app. People are extra sensitive when it comes to handling their money.

I am one of those people. If I couldn't access funds due to some service problem, I would stop using the service unless I saw a good admission of the problem, and explanation of cause, and a description of what the company will do to avoid further issues.

This reply contained all three of those. Kudos to the team for owning up to the problem and assuring their users that they take their money seriously.

The business risks of being overly-apologetic are minimal; those who were not affected, or didn't care, will dismiss the statement and carry on.

However, the reverse is not true; an insufficiently-apologetic email would only serve to enrage customers who were already upset. These users would then be exponentially more likely to sever their relationships with the company.

Although I agree that this approach is a little off-putting, I think it may only read that way to someone not in that second group, which is really who the message is targeting.

That's my take, at least.

It’s the Californian English style of expression, which is all about superlatives and deals only in extremes. With the exploding cultural influence of California in tech, it has spread and you now hear it from many people working in tech, regardless of whether they are Californian or not.

Edit: I guess some Californians got upset and decided to downvote me? It’s not negative in any way, just a different style of expression. You certainly will never hear a Japanese or Romanian person exclaim “this is so amazing!” on a regular basis.

That's super interesting! In seriousness I abhor the superlatives. When everything is super and awesome, they lose their meaning.

I didn't downvote, but suspect some of them are because you offered an unlikely or minor reason behind the superlatives.

Also, I'm unsure of your exposure to Japanese, but superlatives are used frequently in daily conversation. "Sugoi"/"Suge" ("great/amazing!") or " kawaii" ("cute!") are a couple examples. There's some nuance and loss in translation, but the general usage and frequency is similar to American English from my experience with my Japanese in-laws, friends, and employees.

I do agree that Californians and our sun-fried brains seem more likely to take it to an extreme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com