Revolut Outage Forces 1.3 Million Swiss to Pay in Gold Bars
Locked out of their app for a day, Swiss customers had to fall back on their second bank, their third bank, and finally the cellar.
ZURICH. A Revolut outage on Tuesday cut more than 1.3 million Swiss customers off from card payments, transfers and cash withdrawals, plunging the country into a new kind of humanitarian crisis: having to use another bank.
Early estimates suggest the vast majority of those affected switched to their second bank within seconds. The most deprived, those with only two banks, had to move on to their third.
For the most severe cases, authorities activated a long-standing emergency plan: go down to the cellar. Thousands of households were forced to retrieve a 100-gram gold bar wedged between the wine and the Christmas tree, an ordeal that left entire families shaken and slightly dusty.
In Zurich, one baker adapted fast. A precision scale now sits next to the croissants, and gold is accepted by weight. Change is given in Vreneli coins. Customers who only had a collection of old coins were served in a separate, lower-priority line.
“We have all been through something,” said a retiree from Zurich’s wealthy lakeside “Gold Coast,” paying for a rye loaf with a 1935 20-franc coin.
According to the companies involved, the failure originated in a Google Cloud data centre near London. Swiss experts received the news with total calm, most of them unsure where London is, since they don’t keep an account there.
The day’s only real victims were French cross-border workers, who had no second bank, no cellar and no gold bar, and were left stranded at the till holding a lunch tray.
Service was restored in the evening. At press time, the Zurich baker said he would keep accepting gold “for convenience.”
Le Cardon is a satirical paper. This article is fiction.