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Monzo Down: Challenger Bank Cites “Problem with Servers”

Bank joins GitHub, SumUp in suffering IT issues today

By CBR Staff Writer

Updated 20:26 BST: Monzo says it has resolved the issue after circa 90 minutes. 

Digital-only bank Monzo is suffering what appears to be a sweeping outage that has left customers unable to make payments or bank transfers.

Transactions, payments and chat services are all impacted.

The bank acknowledged the issue on its status page at 19:10 BST, saying “we’re getting all the information we need to fix this.”

Monzo down: Challenger joins GitHub, SumUp in having a major Monday wobble

Monzo down

Monzo users are getting this notice on their apps.

Monzo has over four million customers.

The outage comes amid keen attention from regulators on banking availability, following numerous prolonged outages in recent years among the legacy High Street banks, many of which are reliant on aging infrastructure.

See also: Give Financial Services “Sharper Teeth” Over IT Outages: Treasury Committee

Monzo by contrast built its own stack. It uses Apache Cassandra as its transactional database, with its application code written in Go, and uses a Kubernetes-based microservices architecture, with Apache Kafka underpinning its asynchronous message queue and AWS hosting most of its infrastructure.

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The most common causes of IT outages, from a 2020 survey by DR specialist Veeam.

After payment issues on May 30, 2019, Monzo moved a component which connects Monzo to the UK bank transfer network in-house, blaming a third-party for the issue. “We recognise that operating our own infrastructure and systems is the key to reliability, and we needed to establish more specialised expertise into Monzo”, the bank said at the time. It is not yet clear if this evening’s outage relates to an internal issue or one with an external cloud provider, for example.

Monzo joins GitHub and SumUp in facing outages today.

We’ll update with post-incident analysis when we get it.

See also: GitHub Outage Hints at Continued Canary/Production Issues

 

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