In reality that is just not true. Starling has never had an outage that has affected more than 70% of its customers. No other bank can say that and most others have them frequently. We see this all the time with people unable to pay for shopping, get their pay, long payment delays and duplicate payments. These things don’t happen with starling.
The only issue starling has reported in the last three months was a card payment issue which was resolved in an hour and a half 
Source for this?
A quick Google shows a major outage took place in 2017 affecting all card usage, and spanned 9 hours during the day. There was another MSO in 2019 with faster payments transfers, though only for an hour.
Given you consider planned maintenance to be no different, Starling does this every couple of months or so as well, which affects all customers because some services go down, just as this Chase downtime does.
I suspect whatever you’ve read here was carefully spin doctored to make things seem more reliable than they actually. After all if card payments are down for everyone but only 20% of your customers try to make them in that period, does it affect all your customers, or just those 20%?
Proof? I don’t buy the claims here at all, and their status page history heavily contradicts them.
And another 2 months before that when customers couldn’t authenticate transactions. These occurred in the day time and without any prior warning, which can be far more disruptive than planned downtime overnight during one of the quietest periods of the year for the simple reason you can’t predict and pre-empt them.
I think you’re looking at all this through Starling tinted glasses and it exposes your blind bias for them. Starling are not some sort of marvel startup filled with highly sought after world class engineers somehow impervious to the obstacles everyone else has to navigate and occasionally fall victim to. Starling do too. Everyone does.
I’m talking about service failures which are what are reported to the government. These figures are available online as all banks have to report them. Starling has never had one. Monzo has had one and some of the other banks last time I looked had 30 in a year. I think it mostly revolves around the app and being able to make payments. As in actually being able to access and use your account. I’m not sure it covers card payments.
The card issue in 2017 isn’t surprising as their card payments aren’t done in house. They rely on a third party provider but that’s dramatically improved over the years.
You ask for proof. I ask for the proof otherwise as I don’t see any reports or news stories of people suffering in anyway because of starling. I see it all the time with the other banks.
Yes I’m impressed by what starling has done so I don’t see any issue with being biased. Rose tinted no as the facts speak for themselves.
The most serious issue that they seem to have had in the last year is an issue with payments but that was resolved in 30 minutes
This is planned maintenance going on, not an outage. I don’t know why you’re making it a big deal.
Prior notice was also given many days before occurrence .
It happened on a day when automatic payments (direct debits, standing orders, future payments, etc) do not go out, salaries are not paid out.
Card payments were still functional, so customers could still make purchases with no interruptions.
What is the fuss about?
These are different, but if you have a link for this stuff I’d love to have a look.
You made the claim. That burden of proof rests with you. It’s not my job to disprove your claim, though again, their own status page incident history speaks for itself.
You’re not going to find many news stories I suspect because they’re not Monzo, and their customer base is relatively small still. Starling’s users, and their suffering, for all intents and purposes, are irrelevant in the grand scheme of the banking sector, so not the best clickbait material.
Did google though, quite a few popped up, here’s the first one:
https://www.fintechfutures.com/2021/01/starling-experienced-major-outage-on-its-app-last-week/
I’m yet to see the facts! Just spin doctored opinions made to look like them!
Doesn’t really matter how long it is, the fact they happens, and quite frequently, during hours that will actually negatively affect more people than a planned overnight downtime at the weekend during a bank holiday.
You keep saying these things happen frequently but they don’t. The incident you’re referring to which I brought up as well happened last January and hasn’t happened since.
These issues happen far more frequently and for longer with other banks.
If what you were saying were true why would anyone switch to starling or stay with them. We all know the big banks are dinosaurs when it comes to tech so it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Starling has less issues and is more reliable.
The fuss is I couldn’t make a payment when I wanted to which is why I’ll stick to Starling. One of the criticisms of the big banks is they have frequent and long maintenance periods so I don’t see the issue with pointing it out here.
No problem.
Next time take advance warning seriously.
7pm is not a normal time to start maintenance. If it had been after midnight it would have been fine.
Frequency is a relative term. What’s frequent to me might not be to you! Starling have, from a glance, at least one incident report every two months since they launched. That’s some kind of unplanned service interruption every 2 months. To me, that’s very frequent. Particularly when they don’t occur to that extent with banks that go down for maintenance. Because to be clear here, that issue in 2021 is exactly the sort of thing regular maintenance prevents.
To repeat my point here so it drives home. Starling have an incident every two months. Chase have had no such incidents since they launched, though yes, that’s come with the trade off of more frequent planned maintenance.
Proof?
Here’s Barclays quarterly results for open banking reliability.
Now Starling don’t monitor or report on their app uptime and downtime so we can’t compare those, but account servicing we can. They had a small outage in November here just like Starling. No more, no less. An even footing here.
Not many have switched to them! And these issues wouldn’t just discount them either. They provide a better app than most banks, better features, and some people may prefer not having to endure maintenance and the trade offs that come with them, though they’re not maintenance free by any means so monzo is probably the better pick for that aspect.
This just isn’t true though from what I’ve seen, and I’ve asked three times now for you to provide evidence that backs up your claim but you haven’t done, so I can only surmise that your claim is deceptively subjective, as opposed to objective.
I agree it shouldn’t have been planned for 7pm. Still, it came with plenty of warning with big banners in the app, and folks posting about it on a forum you frequent, and it takes place during a bank holiday weekend. You can still make payments, they’ll just go in a queue and be processed when the maintenance is complete.
I get your complaint with the timing though. Nationwide used to irritate me when their maintenance would span the whole weekend, being down during the day too, and not just a specific feature, but the ability to even log in an view your accounts.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I can only speak from my experience of using Starling for years. It’s easy to find examples of the awful situations people with other banks are put into by IT failures.
All the evidence is there that banks give warnings of downtime. I think there is a very simple explanation for how you’re feeling - you have it in for Chase.
Chase is okay but I’m not impressed with the app. I’m not the only one saying that though.
I wanted to make a payment tonight and didn’t even think about maintenance because I’ve never had to. It’s hardly unreasonable for me to state I’m not going to switch to a bank that doesn’t let me do something my current one would.
To be fair Ryan all banks have downtime for maintenance regardless of the time this happens and this could easily have happened to you at another bank.
I’ve always been able to make a payment when I wanted to with Starling.
Everyone else here is obviously fine working around their scheduled maintenance which is fine but that’s not the life for me. Feels very Santander and I don’t want to go back to that 
Okay - all the best
Sure, if you go looking! Starling have hundreds of one star App Store reviews which express similar sentiments towards them as well. I wouldn’t bear them much weight. The vast majority of 5 star and 1 star reviews tend to be hyperbolic, exaggerated, and thoughtless. Instead draw your attention to the two star and four star reviews which are likely to be a bit fairer and paint a more accurate experience.
That’s laughable though. Complain about the planned downtime only to say they’re going to go running back to their traditional bank who also engage in the practice of carrying out planned maintenance! Most with longer disruption periods!
To call the support worse though, I can’t fathom what they’re expecting! The agent did pretty much what you could expect of them, and with haste. You’ll be lucky to get that from other banks.
Just wondered if the hours for maintenance were strange because it’s being done in USA time being a USA bank.
All their previous maintenance started at 2am.
