Oddly, the week that they were down recently only affected Smile and not Co-op customers.
There never was a proper explanation, but I thought at a guess that it had likely been a software patch which had gone wrong - which they probably applied to Smile’s systems first and then would have applied to Co-op afterwards, but didn’t because they had already noticed the problem (luckily) by then.
You’re right that they do have mirror systems, just in different colour schemes, so everything pretty much looks and works the same. One thing worth mentioning is that only Co-op has the “Everyday Rewards” scheme, which may be worth something to you if you are likely to meet the criteria automatically with your usual account usage, as it would be money for nothing.
I didn’t realise they’d been down recently, I use them so rarely (money in on 1st of the month to cover bills - no real need to look at that account).
I have occasionally tried to log on and received a message saying try again later. I also occasionally get messages saying they’ll be down for an entire weekend for maintenance - presumably they have no major complaints from customers.
It does amuse me that on the rare occasions Monzo goes down for a few minutes the forum is flooded with varying degrees of panic and demands for compensation.
Monzo has a more demanding customer base, relatively speaking, who expect the bank to be “always on”.
Smile and Co-op probably have customers who expect the odd outage, and are more relaxed about it.
In fairness to them, with the exception of the incident I referred to earlier (which was an unplanned outage), they do give plenty of notice normally. This means you can move money and check on your account ahead of time so the impact is lessened.
I wouldn’t want to use them as my only account, though, as I would want a bank to be available more consistently myself.
To be honest all banks have downtime so it all depends on the amount of advance warning given and for how long and how many times it happens.
The only thing affected was going online to check your balance. All payments were still working so I was mildly inconvenienced if that. If I really needed to check my balance really badly then I had a cash point or the Post Office.
Not for Smile users as that’s been hugely discouraged so much so that they don’t really answer anything that you could do online on their portal. They actively tell you do go online and do it.
With the reduced hours of 8am till 10pm between those hours it turns into a lost and stolen card line only.
The only benefit is you speak to a real person but they don’t have access to the live system so even if pushed couldn’t help you with banking queries anyway.