System Status

It’s for me now.

Anyway reason for post, Monzo need to make status link more prominent in both app and on monzo.com

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At least Monzo know how to fix their system failures quickly…

image

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Felt this was the most appropriate thread to add to… feel free to move it elsewhere if it needs to be.

Can I start by saying I’m a huge fan of the status page - The updates and transparency are really impressive, and something that other banks could learn a lot from.

However, there seems to have been a few outages recently, some which were generic (faster payments/MasterCard issues), and others which seemingly were more of a Monzo issue.

But… whilst the issue is logged, we never find out what the problem was (see July 18th and 21st).

We (myself included), are very quick to jump at other banks who seemingly can’t stop repeat issues happening (Starling due to their commitment to GPS for example), and I just wondered if Monzo could provide more detail about the technical issues they have had, rather than the last update being “everything is now fine”.

I may add, that none of the issues have affected me personally, but given there was such a positive reaction to building an in house processor, and moving away from GPS, whether the reaction would still be so positive if all these little issues were indeed a Monzo built problem.

Ironically, I only found out about the issues due to Monzo tweeting about it, which shows how “on it” they are, and it may be after all this that it was in fact someone else’s fault.

But it would be good to know either way.

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Agreed. I miss the technical post-mortems we used to see - interesting for transparency, but also to learn about Monzo’s incident response and technology.

That said, there might well have been some that I’ve missed.

Now Monzo is under no obligation to publish these, but I wonder whether a page on their website with these on wouldn’t be a nice touch…

(Edit: for me this is all largely academic as, if I hadn’t been on here, I’d never have know there were any outages given none have affected me. There’s also an interesting counterargument that transparency in this case might lead to less trust - "look at all those failures!) - I’m probably in the transparency camp, but interesting debate nevertheless…).

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Completely agree.

It feels like the issue around transparency is “100% or nothing”.

Most banks opt for the latter, and I would love to know how many issues the legacy banks have (no matter how big or small), that go unannounced.

Because Monzo does announce an issue, people get to know about it, but it feels a little hypocritical to criticise another fintech bank (Starling), who are repeatedly chastised for their “outages due to GPS”, although the reality is, there haven’t been many in the last 12 months at all.

Obviously customers would lose a little trust in Monzo if these repeated (small) issues were indeed because of a Monzo built system.

But then the trust would go even further if the issues were actually someone else’s fault.

I guess as a customer who is using Monzo more and more, I’d like to know something is being done about it.

If this was a GPS issue, the forum would be up in arms about how poor they are, and how things need to change (see Monzo and Starling forums of old).

It feels like the transparency is 95% there, but that last 5% is really important.

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Hmm, I’m not sure I’d go that far.

Whilst I applaud the intent, I’m not sure that 100% transparency is either possible or desirable! (I mean, what does “transparency” even mean anyway? :thinking::wink:). Better, I think, to set a general framework of expectations.

Monzo hasn’t, I don’t think, criticised Starling for their approach to sharing outages, so I’m not sure that hypocritical is the right word. Ultimately both banks will make choices about how transparent to be, and the market will respond to that. To their credit, though, they seem to have changed their approach to their Status Page with previous outages no longer deleted.

(On the Starling point more generally, I’d love it if having both Starling and Monzo in the market meant a race to the top - we’re collectively sometimes too ready to see them as mortal enemies!)

I agree! For me, though, it’s more out of interest, whereas it seems to you that you might be a bit worried about the stability of the underlying system? If this is the case, I can see that it would be important for Monzo to reassure you. For that reason alone, some feedback would be useful!

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Excuse my brief response and lack of quotes, I’m on my phone :joy:.

I didn’t mean Monzo has critisced Starling, I meant us as customers, and the forum in general, have been critical of GPS/Starling.

So, if Monzo have the same issue each time, would it not be hypocritical if us, as customers, didn’t show displeasure at the same problem cropping up?

Just to reiterate, these issues haven’t affected me directly, and I only know of them because of how good Monzo is at letting customers know.

It really is more of an interest thing for me, but at the same time I’d like to know Monzo are doing something about the repeated issues (even if they are small).

Or, I’d like to know the issues aren’t Monzos fault.

This really wans’t supposed to be such an in-depth thing to be honest :joy:

I just wanted to know a little more detail about the outages.

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Ahh, got you!

I think we can all agree on that! :smile:

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Just seen on twitter that it’s a third party who handle the faster payments for several banks who were doing maintenance. Difference is Monzo tell us when there is a delay unlike the other banks

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Were these the issues that affected them recently? (18th and 21st?)

Is Monzo third party for faster payments.

Was a reply to yesterday’s bank transfer issue. Can’t see anything about the issue on the 18th but as it was another half hour issue I’d guess so.

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My knowledge of this space is limited (to pretty much nothing).

Do other banks rely on this as well?

Eg. Did they have the same issues Monzo had?

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A list of directly connected participants if anyone’s interested.
@Rat_au_van wouldn’t this not rule out Monzo using a third party for FPS? I know there are a few different levels of participation in the scheme.

This sums it up for me also. Never been effected by an outage. But I just like to know why things fail out of curiosity :face_with_monocle:

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So all of those banks has the same issue as Monzo?

Thanks @Jackcrwhitney

Just found this if anyone’s interested: http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/membership/access-options

http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/direct-participants-offering-sponsorship-services

It outlines the different access options that can be achieved for the scheme and ones that offer sponsorship / indirect access.

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Do we know which Monzo has?

Direct

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Again, excuse my ignorance on this.

Did all of the banks that @Jackcrwhitney listed in his link, have the same issue?

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