Is it just me, or do other people think that there have been lots of issues lately:
Etc… I’ve been using Monzo for all my non-Direct Debit spend and it’s starting to make me wary of how robust everything is.
What do other people think?
Monzo are completely transparent about any issues they have, you can see the full list of past issues here -
https://mondo.statuspage.io/history
The number of issues that’ve occured each month is actually about the same but the 3 hour outage on the 6th July, that took down most of the challengers, was particularly disruptive.
The good news is that Monzo’s bringing the systems that have been causing these issues in house for the current accounts, having built them themselves & so they’re now under their control -
that will hopefully mean that we’ll see less of these issues in the future or at the very least, faster resolution times & more regular updates when they do occur.
It’s usually not Monzo’s fault. You’ll be pleased to hear the Current Account hasn’t had many (if any, someone can confirm) ‘issues’ since the staff have had their accounts.
Not sure about when these “issues” occurred but I only remember the outage that @alexs mentioned and that occurred when I was at home so it didn’t affect me much. I don’t have a current account so I can’t speak for those, but Monzo has been working fine for me.
I’m not putting any blame, it’s just that over the last month - six weeks I’ve had text message notifications to all of the comments mentioned above, so was just curious to see what other people thought.
I wonder if part of this is the level of transparency Monzo holds itself to? This morning, there was 5–7 minutes where my balance and feed may have been out of date. If this happened with one of the legacy banks, would we even know about a five minute blip? Hard to tell, because my balance takes a couple of days to update after each transaction with them!
I also assume that a lot of these blips are due to the fact that the prepaid card is being used to work out kinks in the system, and that when the current account officially launches, they will be sorted. Saying that, though, you’re right Nick that we maybe should be expecting the average number of issues to decrease over time, rather than remain constant (as Alex has pointed out).
It’s also worth noting that we are still in beta and you should be carrying another card with you… but these issues are frustrating. At least you signed up to get updates to hear about them as quickly as possible.
Ah right I’ve not signed up for text message notifications so I’m not really sure. I haven’t hit any bugs or anything so I just assumed it was running fine, I just rely on in-app notifications
In-app notifications for majoy blips when you won’t be able to use your card. (Usually.)
I like the transparency and the notifications. My original comment was more an observation, not a criticism and I appreciate it is a Beta - I’m generally extremely happy with my experience of Monzo - but it doesn’t stop you being wary when you are aware of “issues” happening.
Sorry, didn’t mean to come across as critical of your original comment, I think it’s a good observation. I find it slightly unnerving, too. I wonder if having two levels of status updates would be useful? For instance, I don’t need texts about the minor issue this morning, though I do appreciate it appearing on the StatusPage site. But for more serious issues, the texts from StatusPage absolutely are useful.
The way 
lets you know of any issues they have is great, compared to many other commercial banks like Barclays and NatWest 
and most of the time it isn’t actually Monzo, it’s the transaction processor that is run by MasterCard or Wirecard! 
When the current accounts launch though it’ll all be very different 
I personally haven’t seen any issues other than the outages but even then they don’t concern me, as mentioned this is a BETA product so issues are to be expected.
At least with Monzo we can report them at they get looked at and resolved fairly quickly.
If people were having these issues when they have a full current account and Monzo were no longer in BETA then I’d understand any issues etc.
Just my general opinion really not digging anyone out.
I somewhat agree - but I think, like others have said, it’s because I’ve got text notifications on from the status page. I probably wouldn’t even notice if they were turned off (except for the big issues)… maybe blissful ignorance is the way forward
I actually don’t mind receiving every single one and they don’t make me worried at all. I get one, I might not see it, this usually means I’m at home not planning to use Monzo within next mins. If I happen see it, I’ll acknowledge.
I didn’t have any failed payments, so I didn’t have situation that text saved me from failing card payment. BUT because I receive them all (or pretty much all Monzo thinks we should get), at any given point in time when using Monzo card I can be really confident that it will work. 
I do expect that volume of them will decrease slightly, once card processor is out of the way, simply based on GPS-caused problems right now.
I totally get why intensity might be ‘too much’ for some users, but then Monzo would face problem of categorising hiccups into 2 categories, less and more serious. Arbirarity of this decision might confuse users, with statements like “this wasn’t serious enough to get a text, why did I get it”. Plus, sometimes issues seem less serious, but it turns out they are serious and the other way around. First 5 mins of investigating issue don’t always allow to make assesment and waiting any longer than that defeats the purpose. 
The only issue I notice lately is that top-up and P2P transactions loose their labels and only have an ID like “p2p_some_random_string_here”. I’d be really curious to know why it is like that - I mean attaching a description string to a data model is like the easiest thing in the world - don’t tell me your database is conscious and hates me enough to intentionally corrupt my data. 
The really short answer to why this feed issue happens is we receive the data from our ledger provider for the prepaid cards but very occasionally fail to enrich the transaction with human-readable data. Rather than drop the P2P or top up from your feed entirely, we still show it in a bit of a weird state. 
You can poke support using the in-app chat and we can hit the resync button on the transaction to fix this issue. Of course, this will not be a problem on the current account. 
Thanks - I didn’t know why you’d use a third-party ledger to hold Monzo-to-Monzo transactions - I’d expect that to be in your own database.
It’s in both!
We hold the information about the other person and the description, the third party holds details of the actual money transfer (again, just for the prepaid beta). The issue is when the two don’t get matched up.
On the back of the recent disruption announcement, are Monzo able to give a timeline of when they’ll be moving away from this 3rd party supplier? Or will it fall with the migration to current accounts?
I find it a bit strange and somewhat unprofessional for a supplier to schedule downtime at a peak time for transactions. Short of their servers being on fire, what could be the urgency for picking lunchtime to do it?