Monzo outage leaves customers without access to services

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Challenger bank Monzo yesterday saw an outage which left its customers without access to payments, bank transfers and customer service.

The FinTech was down for about 90 minutes, reporting issues on its status page for the first time at 19:10 BST.

A little over an hour later, Monzo reported that bank transfers may have been delayed.

“If you have sent a bank transfer, please do not retry unless it has been returned to your account. Card transactions were affected, if your card declined earlier it is now safe to retry. Transactions are still delayed so you might not see an instant notification and feed items for card transactions you made earlier. We expect these to be fixed in the next few hours,” the company said.

Commenting on the Monzo outage, Andrew Stevens, Principal, Banking and Financial Services at Quadient said the outage shines a torch on the need for businesses to implement a crisis strategy.

“At a time when consumers are already faced with such uncertainty, being unable to pay bills, access their wages or even view their balance can be stressful, especially if they are not adequately informed of the severity and likely duration of the problem.

“This outage highlights the need for banks and financial institutions to quickly create a robust crisis strategy to keep customers in the loop whenever a service goes down. This could include anything from push notifications to alert people about the changes in accessing their account, to ensuring that the bank is seen to be active and engaging with customers on social media.

“Customers are inevitably going to encounter problems with banking services, regardless of whether the root cause was anything within the control of the organisation. Going forward, Monzo must make adequately informing customers about the scale, severity and specifics of potential interruptions its utmost priority.”

In May, Monzo’s co-founder Tom Blomfield stepped down from his CEO role to become the company’s first president. The news followed a tumultuous period at the beginning of the Covid-19 period, when the company closed a US office and sold shares at a 40 per cent discount.