We’ve posted a notification on our status page that we’ll no longer be sending SMS updates for incidents we post there.
We’ve been running the @MonzoStatus twitter account in parallel with SMS updates for a while now, and we’ll continue to post updates there
We made this decision primarily because we want to reduce friction for our on-call team (hello ) when we want to post status page messages. At the moment the person posting a status page update has to select which communication channels are appropriate, depending on the incident and message being posted. We recently open sourced our internal incident handling collaboration tooling and are in the process of integrating it with our status page.
A secondary concern was that the SMS delivery did not seem very reliable - we’ve noticed a number of occasions where alerts simply haven’t come through.
Thanks for the explanation It’s a shame that there isn’t an alternative that’ll let people receive alerts while they’re abroad with no data connection.
I think it makes sense from the viewpoint that SMS subscribers got alerted to issues that they would otherwise not be effected by as they weren’t using the service at said time.
How many times have you been alerted in this way for you to think its too often and to unsubscribe?
Personally, having access to my money is a massive priority to me so if any such issues or barriers occur even if they wont actually affect me at that moment I’d like to know about it.
Have never actually received an SMS alert, more so a guessing game when something wasnt working as it should be I then have had to look on here for posts as I don’t use Twitter.
When there was a huge acceptance issue effecting all Asda stores across the country, that lasted for weeks, it was deemed unnecessary to notify in app.
Likewise with the recent gambling sites payment issue.
From a card payments perspective (which is my team here at Monzo!), anything that affects all customers and/or a wide range of merchants is a banner on the app’s homepage. For example, all card services being unavailable, all online purchases failing, an entire large acquirer getting disconnected from Mastercard, or all ATM withdrawals failing.
Issues that only affects a single merchant or only a small (relative to all active users) is placed as an article in the help tab of the app.
I feel like this strikes a good balance between alerting potentially nearing two million people everybody every time one merchant has problems and letting those who are affected by the issue still be informed.
One thing we could do is to look at alerting only people who recently made a transaction at a specific merchant about issues there but today, that’s only been used to send feed items and emails when an airline collapses and we don’t have that fine grained control of who receives our status page banners yet.
I’ve asked for it previously but is there any chance of getting a notification on my phone for anything that is banner worthy? I’d rather know before that the Mastercard network is down (for example) than at the till.
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Anarchist
(Press ‘Help’ search ‘Contact us’ or email help@monzo.com or call 0800 802 1281)
18
A queue of angry people in front of you might be a clue.
If I’m in work and there’s an issue that lasts an hour I don’t really care. I’m in work I’m not using the service at that moment so I need not know about it.
We’ve posted a notification on our status page that we’ll no longer be sending SMS updates for incidents we post there.
) when we want to post status page messages. At the moment the person posting a status page update has to select which communication channels are appropriate, depending on the incident and message being posted. We recently open sourced our internal incident handling collaboration tooling and are in the process of integrating it with our status page.
It’s a shame that there isn’t an alternative that’ll let people receive alerts while they’re abroad with no data connection.
It’d rather have too much information than too little when it comes to normal banking status
