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Monzo: All payments are failing temporarily
- merrvk 10y agoNot an ideal situation for a 'bank'
- tommynicholas 10y agoOther banks relying on this third party will also be down. Actually happens all the time. Banks are very good these days at not losing your money but nothing else is guaranteed to work.
- kennydude 10y agoMonzo is actually slightly better in telling people. I even got a push notification earlier saying the service was down, which a normal bank won't (or can't) do.
- user5994461 10y agoBanks can do it, they have your phone number to message you.
- kennydude 10y agoThey could do it, the problem is would they? The most I've seen with major outages at major banks is they end up on BBC News which is easily ignorable
- OJFord 10y agoThey don't have a status page, though.
- user5994461 10y agoDoubt the folks outside of HN is much interested in reading websites.
- OJFord 10y agoThey are interested in the modern (phone) app-y nature of it all though. So much so that Monzo has stated repeatedly they won't offer a web app at all - the one major thing I dislike about it.
- tommynicholas 10y agoCouldn't agree more. Plus, soon they'll have built their own infrastructure and this kind of thing will be less likely and at the very least easier to deal with.
- merrvk 10y agoNone of the actual banks I use are having any issues. One of the most important things a bank can do is give you the ability to make payments. In this case, the fact that a 3rd party going down will stop this core functionality is horrifying.
- mancmonkey 10y agoOsper, Curve, Monzo and Revolut affected which processor do they all use?
- mancmonkey 10y agoyup its Wirecard http://uk.businessinsider.com/british-fintech-wirecard-monzo-loot-revolut-supercard-2016-11?r=DE&IR=T http://uk.businessinsider.com/british-fintech-wirecard-monzo...
- ereli1 10y agothe processor is actually GPS (https://twitter.com/GPS_Processor https://twitter.com/GPS_Processor)
- tommynicholas 10y ago"None of the banks I use are having any issues" - they all use third parties and they all have issues sometimes. Fact.
- OJFord 10y agoGoes to show, you can shake-up a sector with your modern infrastructure all you want, if you still have to plug into it somewhere... To be completely fair to Monzo though, my limited understanding is that this reliance on a 'supplier' for payments will go away when the beta ends and Monzo's a full-fledged bank/current account, rather than just a prepaid card. EDIT: ^ That was correct, that is the intention: [0] > When we launch the current account later this year, it will not use a third-party card processor and instead transactions will be processed entirely on our own technology. [0] - https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/ https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/
- AdamGibbins 10y agoThey're currently dependent on Wirecard for the underlying processing until they get their full banking license. At which point they can ditch that dependency - that's expected to be in ~May this year. Edit: My mistake, its GPS doing the processing -- who are currently experiencing issues.
- tluyben2 10y agoSo it is the Wirecard infra failing then? And it depends if they can ditch that dependency; they will have to work with GPS or whoever themselves then. That is quite a lot of work. There are companies providing an intermediary to lessen that burden. Ideally you would want to cut it out indeed.
- BillinghamJ 10y agoI believe it is specifically GPS, however I believe they are also doing that directly for their current account launch - they're putting a lot of emphasis on doing everything in-house
- OJFord 10y ago> I believe they are also doing that directly for their current account launch They are, I just updated my top-level comment - they confirm that in the blog post the CTO linked in another comment here: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/ https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/
- reledi 10y agoThis caused an embarrassing moment for us this morning when buying groceries with a queue waiting behind. Since it was only two items, the clerk was kind enough to let me pay later. Would have really appreciated a push notification as soon as the issue occurred -- they sent one a few hours too late. If you're running a critical service, please make sure you have an appropriate and working notification strategy for major failures.
- ci5er 10y agoMonzo was your only payment instrument? If so, they weren't the only fail today.
- reledi 10y agoNo it wasn't. I couldn't remember the pin from my other card off the top of my head because I've been using Monzo for many months. I've learned from my mistake, I hope Monzo has too.
- ci5er 10y agoAh. I hate it when that happens. Hopefully Monzo will keep up their end of the deal in the future!
- user5994461 10y agoNo reason to think that now that there is overwhelming evidence of the opposite.
- OJFord 10y ago> No reason to think [Monzo systems will be available in the future] now that there is overwhelming evidence of the opposite. What would that be then? This outage is not Monzo's, but the processor's, affecting any card issuer that users it - a function Monzo has stated [0] it will do for itself without a third-party when it offers full current accounts later this year. Calling this Monzo's failing is like complaining that Trello went down earlier in the week (due to the S3 outage). It's perhaps even less fair, since I imagine using multiple AWS regions is easier and more common practice than using multiple card payments processors. (Though I am just speculating on the latter point.) [0] - https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/ https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/
- drcharris 10y agoHmm... Revolut had a similar problem today (https://twitter.com/RevolutApp/status/838392571827208193 https://twitter.com/RevolutApp/status/838392571827208193). Wonder if they are related, do they use the same processor?
- wfn 10y agoI think they must be using the same processor (or some other mutual bottleneck upstream) as Revolut is still experiencing "payment declined" issues as of some minutes ago.
- jhuckestein 10y agoI work at Monzo. We've posted an update on the situation on our blog: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/ https://monzo.com/blog/2017/03/05/outage/
- charlieegan3 10y agoThanks for posting this. I appreciate the transparency.
- amarraja 10y agoI got a push notification about the issue, but didn't read it. On paying for a coffee this afternoon either my payment worked or the barrista didn't read the decline message - a little lesson for both of us to read and not assume :) Also from the status page: If you have incurred FX fees because you were unable to use your Monzo card, we will reimburse you for those fees. Please get in touch once this issue has been resolved. Just makes you love them that little bit more!
- robinson-wall 10y agoWas it contactless? I've found staff really aren't used to online contactless transactions which can decline, they just take the "card read successfully" beep to mean transaction approved. I've (accidentally) had a free dinner once when I used a locked prepaid card and neither me or the staff behind the bar noticed that it declined.
- amarraja 10y agoIt was. Happened to me in a bar once too, but I got the decline notification so went back (since it was my local haha!)
- jlgaddis 10y agoI've heard that first paragraph -- not from Monzo, I'm not their customer -- so many times that it really doesn't mean shit anymore, even if 100% sincere. It's right up there with all the companies that stress how "your security is our highest priority", right after they get compromised.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoI don't know much about card processors but could you have two card processors and fall over to one if one failed ?
- JoBrad 10y agoThe recent post on payment processing is helpful, if you haven't read it, to help you know what is failing (the processor), and where they lie in the chain of entities responsible for payment processing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13791913