8 ms·

No excuses – we let you down

57 points by dgelks 9y ago

edoceo 9y ago
As a CEO of a new/small company I want to own problems like this guy does. Crappy problem for hisbteam, but, i can still respect a person/company that puts it out there after.
- azeirah 9y ago
  In my personal experience, it's not always a good idea to do it like this. I've been quick to offer sincere apologies for what were big problems from my own perspective. That unfortunately turned out to affect only a small amount of my customers, confusing and annoying many others. 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?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - katastic 9y ago
    This is a very interesting contention. What examples can you provide of "being transparent and sincere in trying to do better" back-firing? Did massive clickbait articles get reported, blowing up the issue?
    - azeirah 9y ago
      I have a tendency to be over impulsive, in where I get personally emotional over customer emails sent to me, and then I work my ass off to fix the bugs, reports, complaints etc reported in the mails.. Then I figure out that I can't fix everyone's problems by fixing bugs only, get emotional, write a weird and over-emotional post, and just leave lots of customers behind at the end of the process. It's still a small-scale issue if you ask me, as it is mostly personal, but it's an issue for sure.
- pricechild 9y ago
  I'd steered clear of this company to date, and was about to snort at the "apology" but this: > 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.
logicallee 9y ago
What does it mean when Nikolay uses the title and language, >No excuses — we let you down >An apology from the Founder & CEO of Revolut >The last 24 hours have been painful to say the least. Painful for our engineers who have been working around the clock to resolve the issue, but even more painful for our customers who have been unable use their accounts. and >You will get no excuses from me. and >We have let you down and I take full responsibility for what happened. for what is essentially a very minor brief issue. He says: >I would like to reassure you that all personal data and customer funds were completely secure at all times. So I would like your help interpreting why he uses such completely inappropriate and over-the-top apology language for what amounts to brief [Edit: 1 day of] downtime. What is your take? Why is it written like this?
- GuiA 9y ago
  It’s the Californian English style of expression, which is all about superlatives and deals only in extremes. With the exploding cultural influence of California in tech, it has spread and you now hear it from many people working in tech, regardless of whether they are Californian or not. 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.
  - totoboko 9y ago
    That's super interesting! In seriousness I abhor the superlatives. When everything is super and awesome, they lose their meaning.
  - jstandard 9y ago
    I didn't downvote, but suspect some of them are because you offered an unlikely or minor reason behind the superlatives. Also, I'm unsure of your exposure to Japanese, but superlatives are used frequently in daily conversation. "Sugoi"/"Suge" ("great/amazing!") or " kawaii" ("cute!") are a couple examples. There's some nuance and loss in translation, but the general usage and frequency is similar to American English from my experience with my Japanese in-laws, friends, and employees. I do agree that Californians and our sun-fried brains seem more likely to take it to an extreme.
rootw0rm 9y ago
thought it was revolutiontt for a sec...
pfarnsworth 9y ago
This is why exercising your backup systems in production is critical. our company regularly switches to our secondary data center regularly and runs production traffic on it to ensure they failover actually works in reality, not just theory.
ysleepy 9y ago
It seems to be often the main database that on failure catches startups on the wrong foot. The GitLab incident comes to mind. The easiest way to run a database is to set it up as a SPoF. You want to be serious and set everything up with redundancy, but then in case of problems it is just too easy to mess something up by doing the wrong thing when switching back or promoting a stale replica or something. I don't even know if there are proper hosted replicated SQL-ACID databases-as-a-service available one would consider using for financial services and similar use cases. There seems to be merit in paying DBAs proper money to handle these things.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Why aren't the cloud offerings from Google, AWS, etc good enough? My understanding is that their infrastructure is PCI compliant, and there are a few banks already on this infrastructure. Is this simply a case of NIH syndrome, or are there regulations that prevent this?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wonderous 9y ago
  "SPoF (single point of failure) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working."
- jjirsa 9y ago
  You can run a bank without ACID SQL 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)
  - grzm 9y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a reference of how (in what contexts) ING uses Cassandra?
victor9000 9y ago
Wait, let me get this straight. 1. there's no monitoring in place 2. fail over is manual 3. there are no standby servers 4. nothing auto scales 5. backups are not tested 6. they lack sufficient manpower 7. there are no clusters 8. the service is one error away from an outage It sounds like they completely ignored the operations side of running a service, and finally defaulted on technical debt. Yikes! I hope the best for them, but they have to start taking operations seriously.
- amelius 9y ago
  Makes you wonder: if failure handling is so low on the budget/priority list, where does security stand?
  - katastic 9y ago
    Even lower, if my experience with clients is any clue. Most people I've seen running companies are either clueless in general in IT matters (business or engineering people), or, "older" gents who grew up long before IT security and robust backups were "the norm" and stressed in every class and conference. If there's no direct money to be made, it doesn't matter. Only in the last 3 years or so have I seen ANYONE of my clients care about potential hackers and breaches. And one of them only cared... because they were hacked by the Chinese.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  You are making a lot of assumptions based on that blog post. Unless you have other information, I'm confident you don't have it straight and that you are wrong.
- viraptor 9y ago
  None of those points are confirmed by the post. Maybe apart from the sufficient manpower to handle support during emergencies. (But who has that, honestly?) 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))
Y_Y 9y ago
Maybe that sort of contrition works in relationship arguments or parole hearings, but I hardly find it appropriate here. "At around 07:00 BST on Friday morning, our transaction database began to malfunction. Naturally, we followed procedure and switched to a backup server. Unfortunately, the backup server began to drastically slow down and was struggling to process live transactions." That is very vague and sounds like a euphemism for "we don't know who changed the config file but it broke production and so we had somebody spin up a new instance on their laptop". I any case I was in a foreign country when my card (and those of my travelling companions) stopped working without warning or explanation. I don't want him to be sorry, I want a rationale for why I shouldn't switch to an equivalent competitor like Monzo (on the assumption they have better reliability).
- mynameisvlad 9y ago
  Further down, he mentions that it was a server failure and necessitated migrating to a new primary server.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 9y ago
  > That is very vague 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.
throw999890 9y ago
You guys are great. The largest Indian bank is offline almost every night and they are ok with it. Is there a place to publicly shame these kind of entities ? https://onlinesbi.com https://onlinesbi.com
riquito 9y ago
To me the worst offender in revolut is that the ui is not blocked when is waiting for server responses (second is the inability to edit my preferred contacts list). It never caused me problems but I always felt uneasy (I use it more sparirily now so perhaps they fixed something). All the other problems that I care about have been slowly resolved. About the issue at hand this is not the first time the service is down but who knows, perhaps they're starting to learn their lesson. I used it for around 6 months intensively
- robhu 9y ago
  Could you please expand on what you mean by the 'ui not being blocked'. What behaviour do you expect the app to have and why?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Their UI is a mess. You'll enter the pass code, the screen will wipe out of view, revealing... Another pass code screen. Contacts that use Revolut will never be cached, and will instead always be looked up every time without any indication (I guess that's what the GP refers to). For all the funding they have, I'd assume they could fix these, but no, they don't.
DiThi 9y ago
I had no idea what the product is so I clicked the logo. It went to the blog which doesn't explain what it is. Instead it should go to the main site. There's no obvious link in the blog so I had to edit the address.
- forthefuture 9y ago
  > Europe’s leading digital banking app. Instant spending alerts, free money transfers and global fee-free spendi... It's the first line of text after the header.
  - DiThi 9y ago
    That doesn't tell me much. My bank's app already provide those (except maybe the cutoff sentence) so I wanted to know more. What banks or countries is it compatible with, etc. That link doesn't lead me to the answer. edit: After watching the video it seems it's an international online bank that allows you to have and exchange among a bunch of currencies and pay with card at the cheapest rate possible. It doesn't interest me because I don't plan on going out of the EU, where I can pay with just the phone in the vast majority of stores.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- veidr 9y ago
  This is a bizarrely endemic problem on official company blogs, and I've often wondered why. 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?
  - 9y ago
chirau 9y ago
We in Zimbabwe are used to this. The biggest bank, Steward Bank, owned by the much adored Strive Masiyiwa and his Econet Wireless, is offline more than half of the time. They drop transactions and mobile money balances disappear without explanation or apology. Been happening for years now.
- totoboko 9y ago
  Sounds like plain old theft! But they are a bank, so working as intended. Private banks, ah, what a cancer.
roywiggins 9y ago
"Regrettably, we have learnt a great deal from this experience" Well, there's a weird turn of phrase. In what way is learning from the experience regrettable?
- gt_ 9y ago
  Awkward semantics for sure, but I think they regret having to learn from the experience as opposed to learning by considering the possibilities beforehand.
sergiotapia 9y ago
No big deal -- their backup was severely unprepared to handle live transactions. It's not like these guys leaked private information or otherwise lost people money.
nsarafa 9y ago
I for one found the blog post refreshing. Now that it's out there, it might be wise to follow up with a more thorough technical postmortem.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"At around 07:00 BST on Friday morning, our transaction database began to malfunction." and >"This server slowdown has never happened before" Why does this transparency not include meaningful details of what actually went wrong? A "database malfunction" and a "server slowdown" are technical gibberish. This is not dissimilar to the kind of crap a traditional bank says when there are problems. It reminds of hearing "The system is down" from a customer service representative. This apology is on the company's blog alongside a blog post titled "How to extract analytics data from your iOS application", complete with Swift code snippets[1]. So clearly they aren't worried about content being too technical. We are talking about a bank and your money, why would it not be OK to err on the side of being too technical? Or at the very least provide a link for the more technically inclined. [1] https://blog.revolut.com/how-to-extract-analytics-data-from-your-ios-application-ee474a31a80d https://blog.revolut.com/how-to-extract-analytics-data-from-...
- viraptor 9y ago
  > Why does this transparency not include meaningful details of what actually went wrong? 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?
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    >"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?" This blog post was published a whole day after the outage. Also I never questioned anything regarding the lack of follow up plan. I was questioning why technical detail wasn't more forthcoming. >"This is customer communication, not post mortem from engineering ..." The customer comms and service status were posted on their Twitter account on the 29th.
arjie 9y ago
I had to look to find what this company does because the top logo doesn't take me to the page. If I weren't currently busy I might have missed it but I'm actually in the target market. How do they make money?
- vivan 9y ago
  They don't - much like their competitors (e.g. Monzo) they are making losses for every customer they take on, with the hope of monetising it later, à la Twitter.
- cbg0 9y ago
  Not hard to find out: https://www.revolut.com/faq#how-does-revolut-make-money https://www.revolut.com/faq#how-does-revolut-make-money
  - arjie 9y ago
    Well, now I look silly. I couldn't find it on their page on mobile, but more likely my fault than theirs. Thank you.
- odiroot 9y ago
  I used them for more than a year now and I'm really satisfied with the offering. Especially the "magical" debit card.
  - arjie 9y ago
    Thanks, I signed up. It looks like they've added a waiting line now since they couldn't handle the number of new users.
maxehmookau 9y ago
It's nice to see Revolut owning this issue but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them since starting to use them. I was stranded in Australia with my card at the checkout of a supermarket and my card stopped working with no explanation. An hour later, their Twitter feed told us that there was issues. Another incident where I got cash out of an ATM. The ATM didn't spit out my cash but still debited the money. Revolut said it would take 90 days to get my money back. This was £500. At Christmas. Unfortunately as a result of this, they lost my custom for life.

57 points by dgelks 9y ago

As a CEO of a new/small company I want to own problems like this guy does. Crappy problem for hisbteam, but, i can still respect a person/company that puts it out there after.

azeirah 9y ago
In my personal experience, it's not always a good idea to do it like this. I've been quick to offer sincere apologies for what were big problems from my own perspective. That unfortunately turned out to affect only a small amount of my customers, confusing and annoying many others. 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?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- katastic 9y ago
  This is a very interesting contention. What examples can you provide of "being transparent and sincere in trying to do better" back-firing? Did massive clickbait articles get reported, blowing up the issue?
  - azeirah 9y ago
    I have a tendency to be over impulsive, in where I get personally emotional over customer emails sent to me, and then I work my ass off to fix the bugs, reports, complaints etc reported in the mails.. Then I figure out that I can't fix everyone's problems by fixing bugs only, get emotional, write a weird and over-emotional post, and just leave lots of customers behind at the end of the process. It's still a small-scale issue if you ask me, as it is mostly personal, but it's an issue for sure.
pricechild 9y ago
I'd steered clear of this company to date, and was about to snort at the "apology" but this: > 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.

logicallee 9y ago

What does it mean when Nikolay uses the title and language, >No excuses — we let you down >An apology from the Founder & CEO of Revolut >The last 24 hours have been painful to say the least. Painful for our engineers who have been working around the clock to resolve the issue, but even more painful for our customers who have been unable use their accounts. and >You will get no excuses from me. and >We have let you down and I take full responsibility for what happened. for what is essentially a very minor brief issue. He says: >I would like to reassure you that all personal data and customer funds were completely secure at all times. So I would like your help interpreting why he uses such completely inappropriate and over-the-top apology language for what amounts to brief [Edit: 1 day of] downtime. What is your take? Why is it written like this?

GuiA 9y ago
It’s the Californian English style of expression, which is all about superlatives and deals only in extremes. With the exploding cultural influence of California in tech, it has spread and you now hear it from many people working in tech, regardless of whether they are Californian or not. 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.
- totoboko 9y ago
  That's super interesting! In seriousness I abhor the superlatives. When everything is super and awesome, they lose their meaning.
- jstandard 9y ago
  I didn't downvote, but suspect some of them are because you offered an unlikely or minor reason behind the superlatives. Also, I'm unsure of your exposure to Japanese, but superlatives are used frequently in daily conversation. "Sugoi"/"Suge" ("great/amazing!") or " kawaii" ("cute!") are a couple examples. There's some nuance and loss in translation, but the general usage and frequency is similar to American English from my experience with my Japanese in-laws, friends, and employees. I do agree that Californians and our sun-fried brains seem more likely to take it to an extreme.

rootw0rm 9y ago

thought it was revolutiontt for a sec...

pfarnsworth 9y ago

This is why exercising your backup systems in production is critical. our company regularly switches to our secondary data center regularly and runs production traffic on it to ensure they failover actually works in reality, not just theory.

ysleepy 9y ago

It seems to be often the main database that on failure catches startups on the wrong foot. The GitLab incident comes to mind. The easiest way to run a database is to set it up as a SPoF. You want to be serious and set everything up with redundancy, but then in case of problems it is just too easy to mess something up by doing the wrong thing when switching back or promoting a stale replica or something. I don't even know if there are proper hosted replicated SQL-ACID databases-as-a-service available one would consider using for financial services and similar use cases. There seems to be merit in paying DBAs proper money to handle these things.

jdavis703 9y ago
Why aren't the cloud offerings from Google, AWS, etc good enough? My understanding is that their infrastructure is PCI compliant, and there are a few banks already on this infrastructure. Is this simply a case of NIH syndrome, or are there regulations that prevent this?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wonderous 9y ago
"SPoF (single point of failure) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working."
jjirsa 9y ago
You can run a bank without ACID SQL 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)
- grzm 9y ago
  Interesting. Do you have a reference of how (in what contexts) ING uses Cassandra?

victor9000 9y ago

Wait, let me get this straight. 1. there's no monitoring in place 2. fail over is manual 3. there are no standby servers 4. nothing auto scales 5. backups are not tested 6. they lack sufficient manpower 7. there are no clusters 8. the service is one error away from an outage It sounds like they completely ignored the operations side of running a service, and finally defaulted on technical debt. Yikes! I hope the best for them, but they have to start taking operations seriously.

amelius 9y ago
Makes you wonder: if failure handling is so low on the budget/priority list, where does security stand?
- katastic 9y ago
  Even lower, if my experience with clients is any clue. Most people I've seen running companies are either clueless in general in IT matters (business or engineering people), or, "older" gents who grew up long before IT security and robust backups were "the norm" and stressed in every class and conference. If there's no direct money to be made, it doesn't matter. Only in the last 3 years or so have I seen ANYONE of my clients care about potential hackers and breaches. And one of them only cared... because they were hacked by the Chinese.
jasonlotito 9y ago
You are making a lot of assumptions based on that blog post. Unless you have other information, I'm confident you don't have it straight and that you are wrong.
viraptor 9y ago
None of those points are confirmed by the post. Maybe apart from the sufficient manpower to handle support during emergencies. (But who has that, honestly?) 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))

Y_Y 9y ago

Maybe that sort of contrition works in relationship arguments or parole hearings, but I hardly find it appropriate here. "At around 07:00 BST on Friday morning, our transaction database began to malfunction. Naturally, we followed procedure and switched to a backup server. Unfortunately, the backup server began to drastically slow down and was struggling to process live transactions." That is very vague and sounds like a euphemism for "we don't know who changed the config file but it broke production and so we had somebody spin up a new instance on their laptop". I any case I was in a foreign country when my card (and those of my travelling companions) stopped working without warning or explanation. I don't want him to be sorry, I want a rationale for why I shouldn't switch to an equivalent competitor like Monzo (on the assumption they have better reliability).

mynameisvlad 9y ago
Further down, he mentions that it was a server failure and necessitated migrating to a new primary server.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
viraptor 9y ago
> That is very vague 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.

throw999890 9y ago

You guys are great. The largest Indian bank is offline almost every night and they are ok with it. Is there a place to publicly shame these kind of entities ? https://onlinesbi.com https://onlinesbi.com

riquito 9y ago

To me the worst offender in revolut is that the ui is not blocked when is waiting for server responses (second is the inability to edit my preferred contacts list). It never caused me problems but I always felt uneasy (I use it more sparirily now so perhaps they fixed something). All the other problems that I care about have been slowly resolved. About the issue at hand this is not the first time the service is down but who knows, perhaps they're starting to learn their lesson. I used it for around 6 months intensively

robhu 9y ago
Could you please expand on what you mean by the 'ui not being blocked'. What behaviour do you expect the app to have and why?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Their UI is a mess. You'll enter the pass code, the screen will wipe out of view, revealing... Another pass code screen. Contacts that use Revolut will never be cached, and will instead always be looked up every time without any indication (I guess that's what the GP refers to). For all the funding they have, I'd assume they could fix these, but no, they don't.

DiThi 9y ago

I had no idea what the product is so I clicked the logo. It went to the blog which doesn't explain what it is. Instead it should go to the main site. There's no obvious link in the blog so I had to edit the address.

forthefuture 9y ago
> Europe’s leading digital banking app. Instant spending alerts, free money transfers and global fee-free spendi... It's the first line of text after the header.
- DiThi 9y ago
  That doesn't tell me much. My bank's app already provide those (except maybe the cutoff sentence) so I wanted to know more. What banks or countries is it compatible with, etc. That link doesn't lead me to the answer. edit: After watching the video it seems it's an international online bank that allows you to have and exchange among a bunch of currencies and pay with card at the cheapest rate possible. It doesn't interest me because I don't plan on going out of the EU, where I can pay with just the phone in the vast majority of stores.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
veidr 9y ago
This is a bizarrely endemic problem on official company blogs, and I've often wondered why. 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?
- 9y ago

chirau 9y ago

We in Zimbabwe are used to this. The biggest bank, Steward Bank, owned by the much adored Strive Masiyiwa and his Econet Wireless, is offline more than half of the time. They drop transactions and mobile money balances disappear without explanation or apology. Been happening for years now.

totoboko 9y ago
Sounds like plain old theft! But they are a bank, so working as intended. Private banks, ah, what a cancer.

roywiggins 9y ago

"Regrettably, we have learnt a great deal from this experience" Well, there's a weird turn of phrase. In what way is learning from the experience regrettable?

gt_ 9y ago
Awkward semantics for sure, but I think they regret having to learn from the experience as opposed to learning by considering the possibilities beforehand.

sergiotapia 9y ago

No big deal -- their backup was severely unprepared to handle live transactions. It's not like these guys leaked private information or otherwise lost people money.

nsarafa 9y ago

I for one found the blog post refreshing. Now that it's out there, it might be wise to follow up with a more thorough technical postmortem.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"At around 07:00 BST on Friday morning, our transaction database began to malfunction." and >"This server slowdown has never happened before" Why does this transparency not include meaningful details of what actually went wrong? A "database malfunction" and a "server slowdown" are technical gibberish. This is not dissimilar to the kind of crap a traditional bank says when there are problems. It reminds of hearing "The system is down" from a customer service representative. This apology is on the company's blog alongside a blog post titled "How to extract analytics data from your iOS application", complete with Swift code snippets[1]. So clearly they aren't worried about content being too technical. We are talking about a bank and your money, why would it not be OK to err on the side of being too technical? Or at the very least provide a link for the more technically inclined. [1] https://blog.revolut.com/how-to-extract-analytics-data-from-your-ios-application-ee474a31a80d https://blog.revolut.com/how-to-extract-analytics-data-from-...

viraptor 9y ago
> Why does this transparency not include meaningful details of what actually went wrong? 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?
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"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?" This blog post was published a whole day after the outage. Also I never questioned anything regarding the lack of follow up plan. I was questioning why technical detail wasn't more forthcoming. >"This is customer communication, not post mortem from engineering ..." The customer comms and service status were posted on their Twitter account on the 29th.

arjie 9y ago

I had to look to find what this company does because the top logo doesn't take me to the page. If I weren't currently busy I might have missed it but I'm actually in the target market. How do they make money?

vivan 9y ago
They don't - much like their competitors (e.g. Monzo) they are making losses for every customer they take on, with the hope of monetising it later, à la Twitter.
cbg0 9y ago
Not hard to find out: https://www.revolut.com/faq#how-does-revolut-make-money https://www.revolut.com/faq#how-does-revolut-make-money
- arjie 9y ago
  Well, now I look silly. I couldn't find it on their page on mobile, but more likely my fault than theirs. Thank you.
odiroot 9y ago
I used them for more than a year now and I'm really satisfied with the offering. Especially the "magical" debit card.
- arjie 9y ago
  Thanks, I signed up. It looks like they've added a waiting line now since they couldn't handle the number of new users.

maxehmookau 9y ago

It's nice to see Revolut owning this issue but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them since starting to use them. I was stranded in Australia with my card at the checkout of a supermarket and my card stopped working with no explanation. An hour later, their Twitter feed told us that there was issues. Another incident where I got cash out of an ATM. The ATM didn't spit out my cash but still debited the money. Revolut said it would take 90 days to get my money back. This was £500. At Christmas. Unfortunately as a result of this, they lost my custom for life.