Monzo switches to backup bank after app outage

Monzo activated its independent backup system, Monzo Stand-in, on Wednesday after more than 3,000 customers reported problems accessing the bank’s app. The backup restores card payments, cash withdrawals, bank transfers and basic account information while engineers work to bring full services back online.

An outage-reporting website logged over 3,000 problem reports on Wednesday, with about three-quarters flagged as app-related. Customers also reported on social media that they could not make transfers or access their accounts, prompting the bank to switch to its contingency platform.

In a post on X, Monzo wrote: “We’ve identified some issues affecting Monzo and activated Monzo Stand-in, our fully independent backup bank. As a result, you can still make card payments, withdraw cash, freeze your card, send and receive bank transfers, and more.” The company said teams were diagnosing the fault and working to restore full functionality.

Monzo Stand-in is a separate set of systems covering data, software and infrastructure. It runs on Google Cloud Platform and is built to take over when the bank’s Primary Platform, which operates on Amazon Web Services, experiences a major incident.

The backup supports the bank’s most used features: card spending, cash withdrawals, sending and receiving transfers, checking balances and recent transactions, and freezing or unfreezing cards. The Monzo app checks periodically whether Stand-in is active and switches to a simplified interface that exposes those core functions when it is running.

Monzo did not provide a timeline for when the main app would be fully restored.

The disruption follows an earlier outage this week at Lloyds Banking Group that affected online and mobile access for customers of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland. Data published by the UK Treasury Committee in 2025 showed nine of the country’s largest banks and building societies logged at least 803 hours of technology outages combined over the previous two years.