Resilience in Action: When Google Cloud Went Down, Form3 Payments Kept Moving

As VP of Engineering at Form3, I watched Tuesday’s Google Cloud outage put the multi-cloud architecture our teams have spent years building to the test. During the outage, Form3's platform continued to process payments as designed with no material customer impact identified.

For financial institutions, incidents like this highlight how dependent critical services have become on third-party technology providers, and why resilience must be built into the infrastructure that supports them.

Resilience by Design 

At Form3, resilience has been a fundamental part of our platform architecture from the very beginning.

Our platform operates active-active-active across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, with services running across all three cloud providers simultaneously. Our architecture is designed to reduce reliance on any single cloud provider and to maintain service continuity when one provider experiences disruption.

But simply running across multiple cloud providers doesn’t automatically make a platform resilient. It takes years of engineering effort to build systems that can tolerate failures, and continuous testing to ensure they behave as expected. At Form3, we regularly simulate failures, including cloud outages, to validate that our platform can continue operating when things go wrong. This gives us confidence that when a real-world incident occurs, our systems will behave as designed.

The Google Cloud outage on 20th October was another real-world demonstration of that resilience in action. When one provider experiences disruption, our platform is designed to continue processing payments, protecting the critical services our customers depend on. Every payment matters. Whether it’s a salary, a mortgage payment or splitting the bill with friends, behind every payment is a person or business relying on that money arriving when it’s needed. That’s why building resilient payment infrastructure is so important.

A Financial Fabric that Payments Can Depend On 

As payments become increasingly instant and interconnected, the infrastructure supporting them must be able to operate continuously, even when parts of the wider technology ecosystem experience disruption. This is central to Form3’s vision of a global financial fabric, connecting financial institutions through resilient, real-time payments infrastructure that can operate at scale.

By building resilience into the foundations of our platform, we help banks and financial institutions deliver the always-on payment experiences their customers expect, without depending on the availability of any single cloud provider.

The Google Cloud outage reinforced a principle we’ve held at Form3 from the start: payments cannot fail, and resilience must be designed in, continuously tested and proven to work.

For more on how our architecture supports this approach, read our previous blog: Resilience in Action: How Form3's Multi-Cloud Platform Handled the GCP Outage