Interviewed for them this year.<p>Got into a heated argument where the interviewer insisted it was perfectly acceptable to store money as a mutable row in a database.<p>I pushed back with the standard "You append transactions (including corrections) to a ledger" but he wasn't convinced.<p>I whipped out the standard two-ATMs -separated-by-a-distance overdraft example, and how you can create or destroy money that way.<p>He said it made no sense as an example because it was buggy and you would never release buggy code.<p>I asked if he'd done <i>bug fixes</i> before (yes) but obviously he was going to keep digging in further.<p>The irony of it was that he was part of the blockchain team.
I just learned the embarassing way that my ability to pay for groceries depends on the livelyness of europe-west2.
The uptime of cash in my wallet is pretty close to 100%. It's extremely rare that I have to use it, but it's incredibly convenient to have each time it's required
If you look at uptime as discrete set of events when you need to pay for something, my cash uptime is not looking great nowadays. "Sorry I can't break that" or machines accepting coins which you don't have at hand. Just to be clear I despise CC companies the system is broken in many ways.
You are aware that many places don't accept cash, right?
Most EU countries require cash acceptance. There is also an EU-wide legislation in the works: <a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-an-economy-that-works-for-people/file-legal-tender-of-euro-banknotes-and-coins" rel="nofollow">https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-an-ec...</a>
I don't know about other countries, but in Poland you <i>must</i> accept cash except for a few cases (over internet, large transactions, places without employees).
In Jurassic Europe, most still do.
Well its about time (a decade ago) to ignore those places and be vocal about it.<p>Contactless is all fine and dandy but straight out refusal to handle cash is a big negative for the users, which is the only perspective anybody cares about. On top of obvious long term massive loss for society and personal freedom. Don't feed the actors that are harming you / us.
How does that affect the uptime of their wallet?
It's a good idea to have multiple debit cards (both visa and mastercard) from different banks. You can often get them for free.
Agree,so annoying
Its a bigger thing <a href="https://status.cloud.google.com" rel="nofollow">https://status.cloud.google.com</a>
No redundancy redundancy?<p>No redundancy redundancy?<p>No redundancy redundancy?<p>No redundancy redundancy?<p>No redundancy redundancy?
Thanks, your comment was the first one which linked the two.<p>Revolut is the biggest private company in all of Europe.<p>Perhaps it’s me but I still find it kinda wild that a single power outage in London can shut down Google DC and it can lead to Revolut shutting down for some time disrupting much of the economy which depended upon it<p>Perhaps this could’ve been prevented, which makes me wonder how much of code written at Revolut is ai generated and its ai policy?
If their infrastructure is tightly coupled to a cloud provider in a single region then that's what they need to be work on and not necessarily their AI policy.
> Revolut is the biggest private company in all of Europe.<p>As in not publicly traded? That's surprising, to be honest. How is that even measured?
Revolut needs a way to proactively notify users when their cards aren’t working. It’s so frustrating having to go to Reddit just to find out that Revolut is down.
Good opportunity to share some competitive resilience: <a href="https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-monzo-stand-in" rel="nofollow">https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...</a>
Google cloud is having issues in London impacting HSBC, Lloyds & Bank Of Scotland in UK - May impact your ability to pay with a card<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/20/google-clouds-london-zones-takes-a-nap-multiple-services-disrupted/5304084" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/20/google-...</a><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c58jd2kjp93xt" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c58jd2kjp93xt</a>
Can we still pay ? I have some shooping to do during my lunch break and I don't want to feel stupid without a way to pay at the checkout.
My revolut cards (both google pay and actual physical cards) were failing to process payments and had to use my backup card from a traditional bank instead
I could not pay via Revolut card on Apple Pay this morning. However, the same physical card worked.
Article mentions app down, which presumably it's not the same part used by MasterCard
From what I've seen—personally and from a variety of online sources—there's intermittent availability of basically everything, which means you <i>might</i> be able to access the app, or you <i>might</i> be able to pay by card, but that's going to change potentially from minute to minute, with an average of somewhere around 10% uptime. (Which, of course, means that you, personally, might just be in the 90% of downtime all the time until it's resolved.)<p>Take with appropriate seasoning, given its anecdotal nature.
My UK-issued Revolut Visa worked fine in a foreign country at 12:00pm London time, via Apple Pay, if that's any help
I tried to pay gas today with Revolut plastic. Didn't work, used another card.
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Once again, blockchains that use USDC continue to run without any serious outages for years. I just paid for an item with USDC (using Phantom Wallet) right now and there are many other examples of this.<p>No need to wait for a bank and it doesn't matter the blockchain, as long as it supports USDC and you have a crypto wallet, the payment goes through.<p>Stripe knows this already and crypto payments will be here for a very very long time as they already are today.
I've been hearing about bitcoin for 15+ years and I don't think I've ever walked into a shop where they accepted it.<p>So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?
> I've been hearing about bitcoin for 15+ years and I don't think I've ever walked into a shop where they accepted it.<p>I didn't say bitcoin. I said blockchains that use USDC.<p>> So, approximately six 0s of uptime for my use case?<p>No-one cares if 1 person (out of 8 billion and trillions of bots) won't use it. It exists and Shopify and Stripe have crypto payments with USDC which is useful for both humans and agents.<p>[0] <a href="https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto</a>
What on earth are you talking about my guy
This is what I am talking about: [0]<p>If you were following Stripe for years, you would know that they are already using crypto for payments and it is here to stay.<p>[0] <a href="https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto</a>
Not saying it's a vibe-coding issue. But I just imagine a scenario where a global service experiences significant disruption due to a vibe-coded release. No person understands how it works or is able to figure out in less than a week because no human has ever glanced at the code for a couple years, so the decision is taken to unleash LLM agents directly on production to fix the issue. Of course, one of these agents has to do some database migration but there is a breaking change, so they launch a sub-agent to deal with that; the sub-agent doesn't have a full context, so it decides that the easiest way would be to drop the database and so it does. The latest _successful_ backup took place a month ago.<p>$100B value down the drain.