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.
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...
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.
They are reigistered now
- The vast majority of their infra (at least as of ~3 years ago) is self-hosted in data centers that they own, and a lot of their other key cloud infra is/was multi-cloud (i.e. operations could fail over to GCP in the event of an AWS outage)
- Financially they have the healthiest balance sheet of any non-state-owned bank (like, in the entire world). Over the last ~20 years JPMC has acted as a sort of lender of last resort several times, most recently when they bought out First Republic.
- Politically, after navigating the aforementioned instability Jamie Dimon has almost carte blanche support from the shareholders, and everyone knows it. As a result, he can afford to be a lot less... compliant with the current US regime than other major players have been recently.
Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.
It sounds like that story could make a great blog post
Help me understand, is the bad vibes you get from stories from the company culture? Or rather that the media put a target on their back (at at least in my opinion this is because they have a Russian born founder? Revolut is one of the best products I've ever used, I've honestly nothing but good things to say about them.
The revolut anti-fraud thing also seems to be less well done, being easier to trigger than other "real" banks.
Another reminder that we need redundancy for all essential services that we rely on.
Perhaps this "bank" knows its phones would be down too.