Sorry, let me clarify, it was a Verifone managed retail service that went down. If you wanted to shop at, say, Waitrose, there was a time period yesterday where you couldnât⊠with any of your bank accounts. Thatâs what I meant by it affected all banks.
Wasnât my intent at all, Iâm not sure Monzoâs outage was actually the whole bank tho. Unless I got very lucky in how I timed my payments, I had no declines on Monzo yesterday. Definitely, I donât disagree it was bad. I just wonder how many of the complaints yesterday were actually related to the Verifone outage (as far as a customer is concerned who only tries their Monzo card, both are âmy Monzo card didnât workâ).
Just to show that outages arenât the preserve of the new banks, Nationwide currently has this notice up:
Doesnât affect card usage, but pretty annoying if you need to make some payments now (as I do). And I donât remember any warning, but very well could have missed it. In the end, I accept that spells of downtime will happen with any bank. Whatâs important to me is how they are handled and controlled.
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Anarchist
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That message didnât appear in the app yesterday, so I guess âplannedâ is short for âsomething just came upâ
I can beat that. A town I used to live in was mostly cut off from the Internet for nearly a week due to an avalanche. There was one remaining path out, but the biggest ISP didnât use it, and others had limited connectivity (only a few hundred k and high latency).
Oh, and one of the major mobile phone providers had no calling or texting even.
And thatâs why I left America Jk, but seriously. That stinks. But again, outages happen. Kudos to you and the rest of the Monzo team for being so open about them. Trust me, itâs won my support!
Barclays is going down for the hours this weekend for maintenance (app +web).
However I do see your point - core banking functions should never be down. This is something large banks have internalised. Monzo should do whatever it takes to make that happen even running a two isolated versions of their core apis with different change tempos.
Nowadays a lot of outages (esp on big cloud apps) are caused by config changes as people donât take those as seriously as code changes, so itâs important to isolate a backup production instance.
Not really. It happens all the time, and is one reason why I have more than one account. These are just two semi recent stories that I rember, because I was affected by both:
That was the nice downtime at RBS/Natwest/Ulster Bank. Lets not forget that in 2012, they had the biggest computer problem ever incurred by a UK bank. RBS/Natwest was out for days and some customers had problems for up to 10 days. Ulster Bank customers had problems for up to a month! Funny that I still bank within the RBS Group.
Not really. It happens all the time, and is one reason why I have more than one account.
Fair point, it probably happens more than we realise as most banks are far less open about it than Monzo. It is relatively rare though IMO, not sure Iâd say it happens all the time, Iâve never personally been affected by a bank outage save the Monzo one recently, but just looked it up and my banks have had them, they just didnât communicate about them to customers.
I switched to Barclays from RBS a year back. A friend switched from HSBC. A family member from Halifax. They seem to be IMO best of the âbig banksâ in terms of mobile app capabilities & usabilityâŠ
Have to agree with this one. Also the comment on stagnation.
Just the ability to schedule payments to a pot enables so much personal financial management and yet it seems like it will be quite a long way off (6-9m) and was quite a disappointment to me (Iâd have been happy enough with a month or twos wait)
Pots felt very unfinished without this functionality, and I very much understand the minimum-viable-product-then-improve methodology, but it feels so core to âhaving lots of mini savings accountsâ to move payments in a regular fashion that it really is an absolute minimum without it and couldnât believe its going to be months before we see it improved.
Android parity lags so bad too.
CA development has clearly absorbed Monzos energy and it will take a little time to get back on to some decent app improvements path.
Which is all absolutely fair enough, this has been a huge effort to get this far no doubt.
Iâll prob use Starling actually for a bit, then rejoin monzo in earnest in a year or so when it is a bit more what it sets out to be. I prefer nearly everything about what monzo stand for and their execution is often just great, itâs just falling a bit short of a bank replacing product for now.
Good point actually! Would be good to get some information on that. Will Monzo be choosing the recommendations for you or will it share user data so to the recommended companies?
No ways to pay cheques (still sometimes being given by companies for returns!) or cash.
Some of these are rarely used but if you are to have only one bank account you do need to be able to have those services. Monzo needs to start being backwards compatible or they will always be the âpre-paid cardâ which is now technically a bank
This is something we are hoping to make a lot clearer as we work through the actual implementations and nitty gritty details but, I think it is important to note that the marketplace will be opt-in, so if you didnât like the terms, or didnât want to be a part of it you wouldnât be âinâ be default.
Whatâs important to me is how they are handled and controlled.
That sucked for sure!
Jk, but seriously. That stinks. But again, outages happen. Kudos to you and the rest of the Monzo team for being so open about them. Trust me, itâs won my support!
