No excuses – we let you down

Because the people who can provide that are busy. This is customer communication, not post mortem from engineering. They had engineers spending whole day with extra hours on Friday to resolve the issue, then there was the weekend. I expect they'll take a day or more to dissect it internally, plan follow up, start working on it, etc. Publishing the plan can come later. (If they plan to do that)

What would you prefer them to do first: work on the follow up plan, or spend time writing a blog post about the follow up plan?

I still appreciate the intention to strive for transparency, but you need to do it right. If I ever do it again, I'll need to make sure that I know for sure how many people it's affecting, and how much.

What kind of a company are you building?

> If you were forced to use an alternative payment method and therefore incurred fees, we will fully reimburse you for this amount.

does make me waver, they're obviously trying to do the right thing.

I'm still confused about whether they provide the same guarantees other organizations do under the FSCS. I wouldn't feel comfortable without this. Responses by their team to questions about this suggest they protect your deposits under some other regulation... but since it's different I don't understand it yet and trust it less.

It's not a post from engineering. It's an announcement to customers. Most will neither understand nor care about the details of that infrastructure failing. What you want is an engineering post mortem which is a completely different kind of post. Don't get me wrong, I want them to publish one and would love to read the details. But their engineering team has (hopefully) much more important things to do at the moment.

What behaviour do you expect the app to have and why?

It's the first line of text after the header.

I always guessed it was something like, "Many WordPress and other blog-theme designers default to thinking of the blog is the product or main website itself, so their themes link the logo to the blog itself (and perhaps(?) there's no easy setting in the GUI to change this)?"

I see this default behavior on my own personal blog[1], which uses a fairly popular free theme, but in that case it's correct because my blog is really its own standalone thing.

[1]: Hehe, did you think I was going to try to plug my personal blog here?

ING uses Cassandra, which has no single point of failure, has been around for almost a decade, and would have made gitlab’s mistake a nonissue (and almost certainly would have made this one a nonissue as well - single instance failures don’t matter and linear scalability is a thing)

Especially the "magical" debit card.

Some of your points are almost dangerous. Not automatically failing over something handling large number of financial transactions may be a good decision, unless you can guarantee consistency between environments. Same goes for autoscaling databases (if you can even autoscale them in that environment - I'd expect them to be write-heavy and transactional, which is a good reason for scaling up, not out (or sharding or other things, not the point))

Edit: I guess some Californians got upset and decided to downvote me? It’s not negative in any way, just a different style of expression. You certainly will never hear a Japanese or Romanian person exclaim “this is so amazing!” on a regular basis.

However, the reverse is not true; an insufficiently-apologetic email would only serve to enrage customers who were already upset. These users would then be exponentially more likely to sever their relationships with the company.

Although I agree that this approach is a little off-putting, I think it may only read that way to someone not in that second group, which is really who the message is targeting.

That's my take, at least.

Revolut positions itself as a full service bank, including account number and sort code - they will have users that understandably use their product as their primary account. There will be regular users that will be unable to pay for lunch, and business users that will be unable to pay employees and suppliers (don't forget that it was last Friday of the month, a common payday in the UK). To let their customers go without access to their funds for an entire working day is not a 'brief downtime', it's completely catastrophic.

I'm also not surprised that user's did not hear back from support. I was formally a Revolut premium user that used the 'premium support', and they frequently had support response times >4 hours (one time over >6 hours). It's no surprise that when something serious happens their support infrastructure completely collapsed.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt over their downtime, but I struggle to understand how it took them an entire working day to realise that an application server was playing up, and why a single server was able to take down up to 75% of their transaction processing?

Lastly, if there is anyone out there considering Revolut, please be aware that despite their advertising that they do not add FX fees they actually do add fees on the weekend: https://community.revolut.com/t/weekend-exchange-rate-surcha...