UK neobank Monzo experienced a service disruption on January 13 that while brief, fueled a wider conversation on resilience as a customer experience and a trust issue, as well as increasingly, a commercial one.
Monzo moved quickly to communicate what was happening. “This afternoon, we identified some issues affecting Monzo,” the bank stated in a post on X, adding that it had activated Monzo Stand-in, its fully independent backup bank. This meant that customer could still make card payments, withdraw cash, freeze cards, send and receive bank transfers, and so on.
“We’re rolling out a fix and moving quickly to get full service back up and running for everyone. Thanks for your patience,” the post said.
Less than half of hour later Monzo confirmed a return to usual service:
“Update on our previous post: you should now be able to use the Monzo app as normal. Thanks for your patience whilst we investigated the issue!”
That ability to keep core services running — and to explain the incident clearly in plain language — is as important to limiting customer frustration as the fix itself. But the incident also highlights how exposed customers feel when digital banking falters, even temporarily.
Scott Dawson, CEO of payments processor DECTA, framed the outage as part of a bigger structural problem. “Yesterday’s outage in the Monzo app outlines how critical reliability has become to the global payment ecosystem. In an era where digital banking is the default, retailers and financial institutions can no longer afford to treat resilience as an optional luxury.”
“We are seeing a worrying trend of institutional failures across high-profile organizations, from banks to retailers like Marks & Spencer. These incidents highlight how brittle legacy architectures and siloed practices remain vulnerable to disruption.”
Dawson pointed out that other enterprises could learn from Monzo’s fallback capabilities. “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.”
The outage sits within a much broader pattern of infrastructure fragility that extends well beyond banking. In recent months, high-profile disruptions at AWS, Cloudflare and Microsoft Azure have taken entire swathes of the Internet, retail platforms and financial services offline, often caused by a single misconfiguration or cascading dependency failure. For businesses, resilience can’t stop at the application layer. It has to account for upstream providers and concentration risk.
Dawson also connected outages directly to customer trust and brand value. “When a system fails, it isn’t just a technical glitch; it wipes millions off market values and, more importantly, erodes customer trust.”
That erosion often shows up as spikes in complaints, pressure on contact centers, and customers questioning whether a service is dependable enough to stick with.
Hannah Fitzsimons, CEO of Cashflows, reiterated the importance of building more resilient systems. “Stand-in capabilities and fallback infrastructure are becoming critical, not exceptional, and regulators will increasingly judge providers on real-world resilience rather than theoretical uptime.”
“For payment service providers and merchants, this sharpens the case for moving away from brittle, monolithic stacks towards modular, API-led platforms that are designed for failure as well as scale.”
“Operational resilience has to be engineered end-to-end, from processing and routing through to settlement and reporting, with redundancy built in by design.”
Why Outages are Becoming a Customer Relationship Issue
Fitzsimons emphasized that the customer impact depends less on whether an outage happens and more on what customers can still do when it does. “For UK businesses, yesterday’s Monzo disruption is another reminder that ‘always-on’ payments are not a guarantee. Anything can happen, as we saw multiple times throughout 2025 in both payment providers and retailers like Co-op and Marks and Spencer.”
“In a world of rising complexity, growing volumes and zero tolerance for downtime, investment in resilient payments infrastructure is no longer defensive spend – it’s essential to protecting revenue, reputation and customer trust.”
“What matters isn’t just whether an outage occurs, but whether customers can continue to pay, get paid, and access cash when systems fail.”
That distinction is important for CX leaders. Uptime statistics mean little to customers who can’t complete a transaction when they need to.
Judopay CEO Anant Patel struck a similar note, arguing that outages are becoming frequent enough that resilience can’t be treated as a nice-to-have.
“Fortunately, in this case Monzo was able to activate a ‘back-up bank’, but not every company has that luxury.” For customers, repeated incidents can start to feel like a systemic problem rather than bad luck. Patel warned:
“The repeated failures of banking apps illustrate a fundamental weakness in the resilience of the systems we rely on most. It’s no longer enough to simply talk about resilience… especially when dealing with people’s finances.”
The most visible impact on customer experience comes after systems are restored. Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911 and Fi911, as well as Chief Information Officer of Global Risk Technologies, said
“When a digital bank goes down, the damage doesn’t end when systems come back online. What changes is customer behavior.”
Eaton explained how loss of access can quickly turn into disputes. “After outages, people lose visibility and control in the moment. When access returns, the fastest way to regain that control is often the dispute button. We consistently see more ‘I didn’t authorize this’ claims and far less patience for delays or uncertainty.”
That lagging impact is easy to underestimate. “What repeated outages create is a trust reset. Availability is part of the payment promise. If banks don’t plan for the dispute fallout of downtime, they don’t feel the cost immediately. They feel it weeks later, in chargebacks, operational strain, and frustrated customers.”
Monzo’s outage is less about one bank’s systems and more a reminder of how tightly infrastructure and experience are now linked. Clear communication and resilient design can soften the blow, but expectations are rising fast. As Dawson put it:
“Businesses must move away from reactive, patchwork fixes toward proactive resilience engineering architected into every layer of their IT strategy. Until the industry adopts uniform metrics to measure and enforce these standards, every transaction and customer relationship remains at risk.”
“It is no longer enough to simply talk about resilience; it must be a non-negotiable element of modern business infrastructure.”
