Monzo, a top digital bank, experienced a several-hour outage this past week. The American Banker reported that users experienced failed payments and challenges in reaching customer support.
On the Monzo community board, a representative stated that as soon as platform issues were identified, they activated the “Monzo Stand-in,” a fully independent backup bank.
“As a result, customers can still make payments with their card, withdraw cash, freeze their card, send and receive bank transfers, and more. We are working on resolving this as soon as possible.”
Last year, Monzo posted a report on “tolerating full cloud outages.”
“We take reliability seriously at Monzo, so we built a completely separate backup banking infrastructure called Monzo Stand-in to add another layer of defence so customers can continue to use important services provided by us. We consider Monzo Stand-in to be a backup of last resort, not our primary mechanism of providing a reliable service to our customers, by providing us with an extra line of defence.”
The bank explained that Stand-in runs on two independent systems that support the most important features, so customers experience minimal impact. The system was put to work in 2024 when Stand-in took over after a one-hour outage. The system is said to be a huge success.
Anant Patel, CEO of Judopay, said the outage in the Monzo app underscores the importance of reliability in payments.
“Retailers can no longer afford to treat resilience as optional as payments and banking outages become more common. This incident, coming on the heels of other major outages and cybersecurity incidents at high-profile retailers like Co-op, highlights how brittle legacy architectures and siloed practices are still vulnerable to outages. Fortunately, in this case Monzo were able to activate a ‘back-up bank’, but not every company has that luxury,” said Patel. “Until businesses adopt uniform metrics and invest in fail-safe recovery plans, every transaction—and every customer relationship—remains at risk.”
Patel said that businesses must shift from reactive patchworks to having solid backups like digital bank Monzo.
“Businesses must move from reactive patchwork to proactive resilience engineering architected into every layer of IT strategy, or retailers will continue to pay the price – having solid backups like Monzo.”
Scott Dawson, CEO of DECTA, shared his opinion on the outage, echoing the sentiment of Patel. He said that financial services can no longer treat resilience as an optional luxury:
While Monzo was able to activate its ‘back-up bank’—a proactive engineering feat that kept core services like card payments and cash withdrawals running—not every company has that safety net,” stated Dawson. “We are seeing a worrying trend of institutional failures across high-profile organisations, from banks to retailers like Marks & Spencer. These incidents highlight how brittle legacy architectures and siloed practices remain vulnerable to disruption. When a system fails, it isn’t just a technical glitch; it wipes millions off market values and, more importantly, erodes customer trust.”
Several members of the Monzo community lauded the bank’s efforts to minimize the inconvenience caused by the outage. Perhaps the biggest question is, why aren’t other banks taking the same approach as Monzo?