Co-operative Bank appears to be down

Is Co-operative Bank down for everyone or just me?

That is the only question worth answering when a site stops loading, and it has a simple test: check it from a machine that shares none of your network. This page does exactly that — the request comes from our server in London, using its own DNS resolver and its own route to the internet. If co-operativebank.co.uk answers us, it is up, and whatever is stopping you sits between your device and the wider network.

Local causes are more common than real outages. A stale DNS entry, a router that needs a restart, an ISP resolver holding a bad record, a VPN exit node the service blocks, an ad-blocker rule, or simply a cached error page in your browser: each one produces a site that is "down" for exactly one person.

What a failed check actually means

When a check fails we name the stage that failed rather than saying "down", because the fixes are entirely different. DNS failure means the name could not be turned into an address — an expired domain or a broken nameserver change. Connection refused means the machine answered but nothing is listening: the web server process has stopped. Timeout means packets vanished — a firewall, a routing problem, or a server too loaded to accept connections. TLS error means the site is running but its certificate is expired or mismatched, and every browser will refuse it.

What tends to cause a Banking & payments outage

Scheduled overnight maintenance (commonly somewhere between midnight and 6am UK time) is the most frequent cause of a "down" report for a bank's app or online banking. Daytime outages are rarer and usually a card-processing or authentication service failing rather than the bank itself.

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