When a bank connection breaks, it is usually the bank

Why bank feeds stop working, what the different failures look like, and why re-authenticating is not the same as reconnecting from scratch.

Every app that connects to your bank eventually shows you an error about it, and the natural assumption is that the app is broken. Usually it is not. Bank connections are a negotiation between three parties, and most of the ways they fail come from the bank’s side of it.

The four common failures

• Consent expired. Many institutions require you to re-authorise data access periodically. Nothing is wrong; the permission simply timed out.
• Credentials changed. You changed your banking password or security questions, which invalidates the existing connection by design.
• Additional verification. The bank has decided this connection needs a one-time code or a new multi-factor step before it will hand over data again.
• The institution is degraded. The bank’s own data feed is slow or down. Nothing you do at your end will fix it, and it usually resolves without intervention.

Why you are not seeing this on a status page

Aggregators publish a status page for their own systems, but institution-level health generally lives behind a developer dashboard rather than on a public page. So an app can be entirely healthy, a specific bank can be entirely unhealthy, and there is no public URL where you can confirm it. The practical signal is whether one institution is failing while your others are fine.

Re-authenticating is not reconnecting

This is the part that causes the most unnecessary work. When a connection needs attention, the fix is normally a short re-authentication against the existing connection: you confirm who you are, and the same connection resumes. Everything already synced stays where it is.

Deleting the connection and adding the bank again is the expensive path. It creates a new connection, which typically means re-fetching history and reconciling it against what you already had. It is worth trying the repair flow first, and only starting over if that genuinely fails.

What a well-behaved app should do

• Tell you which account is affected rather than showing one generic error
• Distinguish "needs your attention" from "the bank is down, nothing to do"
• Offer the repair flow rather than only offering to reconnect
• Leave existing transactions and receipts untouched while the connection is broken
• Catch up automatically once the feed recovers, without you asking

A broken feed is an inconvenience. Losing the record you had already built because of one is not acceptable, and it is the thing to check for in whatever tool you choose.