🚨 Google lost power in London this morning and Revolut, a bank with 80 million customers, went down with it. I've spent the morning reading what Revolut users went through. It's wild. People stranded at petrol stations, unable to pay for fuel or a taxi to the airport. One traveller couldn't get out of a train station in Japan. A 71-year-old woman stood at a supermarket till for an hour. Her kid had to drive 30km to bring her cash. Card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange, share trading. All down. Revolut's statement said "all our customers' money and data are safe." Safe. You just can't touch it. Google's explanation so far is a "power event" in one zone of its London cloud region. Its advice to affected customers was to move their workloads to another zone or region "if feasible." Must be nice. Revolut customers couldn't even move £10. In July the UK government put Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft and Oracle under direct Bank of England oversight, because one outage at any of them could shake the entire financial system. 12 days ago the Bank of England ran a drill with the UK's 38 biggest banks and market operators. The scenario they practised was a global cloud outage. And exactly one year ago today, AWS went down and took Lloyds and Halifax with it. Same date. Different cloud. Lloyds was having problems again this morning. Revolut spent five years earning a UK banking licence. Bitcoin has been running for almost 18 years. It doesn't have a London region.

We built a replacement for AWS DynamoDB, a key-value database for fast web content fetches. This was done with two engineers and hundreds of persistent Computer agents over two months. Migrating to our in-house database will save us up to a hundred million dollars yearly.