- Key insight: Monzo fixed the core issue but has not yet disclosed the specific root cause of the platform failure.
- Key insight: A “back-up bank” system allowed some users to perform basic tasks like transferring savings despite the outage.
- What’s at stake: Customers faced failed subscription payments and difficulty reaching support staff during the outage.
Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review
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Monzo, a U.K. bank with a U.S. fintech presence, suffered a two-hour disruption on Tuesday that degraded core banking services for thousands of customers.
The disruption began at 10:31 a.m. ET and lasted until the bank declared a recovery at 12:36 p.m. ET, according to an incident report from Monzo.
During this window, the bank’s mobile app card payments, and both inbound and outbound bank transfers suffered “degraded performance.”
The company continued to monitor the system for side effects throughout the afternoon. Monzo said it “fixed the core issue,” but the bank’s status page did not disclose the specific root cause of the platform failure.
Monzo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Customers shared anecdotes about the impacts of the disruption on a Monzo-maintained online forum. One user reported that the outage caused a virtual card subscription payment for an online store to fail. Another customer noted that the bank’s phone system appeared to be down, preventing them from reaching support staff.
Another customer said the backup system enabled basic functionality in the Monzo app, including transferring money out of savings accounts and viewing PINs, but other features were unsupported. For example, they could only see the last four digits of virtual cards.
Industry experts warned that failures such as what Monzo suffered highlight the fragility of modern banking infrastructure.
“Yesterday’s outage in the Monzo app outlines how critical reliability has become to the global payment ecosystem,” according to Scott Dawson, CEO of the payments processor DECTA, in a Wednesday statement about the incident.
Dawson praised Monzo’s “proactive” engineering approach, in which it maintained what he described as a “back-up bank” to keep card payments and cash withdrawals functional.
Anant Patel, CEO of Judopay, said many existing legacy architectures are “brittle” and urged businesses to adopt “proactive resilience engineering.”
“Retailers can no longer afford to treat resilience as optional, as payments and banking outages become more common,” Patel said.