Revolut is down today because of a Google Cloud outage in London (europe-west2). A power event in one availability zone knocked out multiple services. Revolut’s app, cards, and payments went offline (funds and data are safe). Other banks and services were hit too. Why didn’t multi-region or multi-cloud save them? They use Google Cloud heavily (multi-year partnership) and do multi-region for some workloads. But the critical path (auth, card authorization, payments) was still too dependent on the London region. When that region had issues, failover didn’t fully cover it. True active-active multi-region/multi-cloud for stateful banking systems is expensive and complex (data consistency, latency, compliance, testing). Many fintechs accept the residual risk until an incident forces the issue. Decentralized options like Akash $AKT can reduce single-provider risk in theory, but they don’t currently match the compliance, SLAs, and predictability banks need for production payments infrastructure.