Revolut suffered a significant service disruption on October 20, affecting users in Bulgaria as well. Bulgarian broadcaster bTV reported difficulties signing into the app, making card payments and transfers, and loading transaction information. These are reported problems, rather than evidence that every customer experienced the same disruption.
Bloomberg TV Bulgaria relays a Revolut statement linking the disruption to a Google Cloud outage. According to the company, customers' funds and data remain safe and teams are working on recovery. This is Revolut's assurance; our editorial team has not independently audited its systems or customer accounts.
What Google confirms
Google identifies a power event in europe-west2-b, a zone in its London region. The official incident window is 09:08–17:00 Bulgarian time on October 20, lasting 7 hours and 52 minutes. Its 17:03 update says the issue has been mitigated for most customers, although a small number may remain affected. A detailed analysis is still to come.
These times have been converted from the incident log's Pacific time zone to Europe/Sofia. Restoring cloud infrastructure and restoring a particular financial service are different events. Closing the infrastructure incident therefore does not, by itself, confirm that every operation inside the app is working again.
Revolut's evening status for Bulgaria
When read directly in a browser at 19:57, the Bulgaria status page showed 23 partially unavailable services and one undergoing maintenance. Sign-in, transfers and ATM withdrawals carried incident notices. Card payments were separately marked as maintenance, also with an incident message. This is a snapshot, rather than a promise about the recovery deadline.
The difference between the current page and earlier coverage matters to readers. A list of problems observed in the morning should not automatically become a list of functions still unavailable in the evening. For a particular operation, the relevant service's status matters more than the headline describing the overall incident.
Zones, regions and resilience
Google's documentation defines a region as a geographic area comprising zones. A zone is a deployment location for resources and is treated as an individual failure domain. To withstand a zonal problem, Google recommends deployment across multiple zones; regional risk calls for corresponding planning across regions. This is general architectural context, not a description of Revolut's internal configuration.
Its disaster-recovery guide distinguishes RTO, the maximum acceptable downtime, from RPO, the maximum acceptable period for which data might be lost. It also recommends regularly testing the recovery plan. The two objectives describe different requirements: how quickly service returns, and how current the recovered data must be.
Questions for the subsequent review
Our editorial interpretation is that an assessment should follow the actual path of an operation, from accessing the application to receiving a confirmed result. Having a spare server does not, on its own, answer whether dependent services, access and data can continue working together.
The subsequent review will need verifiable information about the scope, recovery sequence and testing of fallback mechanisms. The public materials we have read do not establish Revolut's precise architecture or explain why a particular fallback mechanism did or did not work.
The current story therefore has two separate parts: the documented cloud incident and the observed state of financial services. Keeping them distinct provides more useful information than a blanket assertion that everything stopped working or that everything has already recovered.
Editorial verification: 2026-10-20T17:00:44.584541+00:00 (UTC). Revolut status was read on October 20 at 19:57 Europe/Sofia. Cover: conceptual AI illustration, not a documentary photograph.
