PayPal users are reporting the widespread failure of the PayPal subscription service.
According to user reports, the subscription service stopped working August 30 and remains down. PayPal subscription payments are used widely by service providers that require monthly payments, such as web hosts, membership based services, and others.
In a post to the PayPal Development blog September 1, PayPal advised that the issue would be fixed by September 5 or 6, and that all outstanding subscription payments would be collected.
Not surprisingly, PayPal merchants are less than happy with the delay in repairing the system, suggesting that PayPal may be too busy holidaying over the US Labor Day long weekend to care for their customers. Given the size of Paypal and the relative popularity of subscription payments, payments being delayed could easily total tens of millions of dollars.
If you’re a PayPal merchant who has been affected by the outage or has more details, let us know in the comments.
Thanks for the tip falko.
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Perhaps it is down in some areas - but we have made about 20 payments in the last two days and there have been no problems.
But PayPal has to be very careful about any failures, this could potentially cause users to be even more concern about being their accounts being hackable
Web
As noted in the post, this is subscription payments, not one offs, certainly I’ve received Paypal payments in the last day. Subscription= regular scheduled payments.
@Web: New subscriptions are still working, but the renewal isn’t anymore.
As far as I see, PayPal is still collecting the money from the subscribers, but they don’t pass it on to the web site owners (until September 5/6), which means the subscription ends. So subscribers think they have paid and should be able to use the service they’ve paid for, but they aren’t. Of course, they’ll think it’s the web site owner’s fault and get angry at him. That’s a huge problem reputation-wise…
Another problem is that people might just buy another subscription, so after September 5/6, they end up with two active subscriptions, and web site owners will then have to go through the hassle to sort these people out manually and inform them and refund the money for the double subscriptions. That could be a lot of work…
Nope nothing wrong here… all transactions carried out perfectly.
Stop blowing it out of proportion or hyping it up!
Dev - something very wrong is definitely going on according to the paypal dev community.
@Dev: The PayPal Merchant Technical Support Team has confirmed the problem: https://www.paypaldeveloper.com/blog/article?blog.id=mts_updates&message.id=128
Dev
Michael has changed the title of the post to multi-payment for clarification, despite possibly making the title a tautology. Again though, what’s not working is subscription payments, not normal every day one off payments, and this is what Paypal users are saying AND the issue has been admitted by Paypal itself (link in post) so I’m struggling to see how we are hyping anything when all I’ve done is reported facts.
Well, paypal does perhaps deserve a bit of a slap for letting this carry on for an entire week (if it does last until the 7th as they report). In my opinion weekends should be no excuse for web based businesses, especially of paypals size.
But, this turned out not too be that big of an issue for us anyways - we just manually updated all content depending on subscriptions to remain active until it is fixed. No more worries. Though, if the payments that are missing do not properly get sent out around the 7th, then, it just may be time to take a walk down to the local store and buy me a pitchfork >:)
I can confirm that subscription payments are not working and haven’t been since the 30th. This is a serious problem, but I’m sure everyone is glad the paypal developers/administrators are enjoying their labor day weekend.
First Skype now PayPal….
I guess the VP Operations at eBay might be having so tough questions to answer…oh wait, they don’t have one!
Let’s see whether this leads to some reorganisation at eBay, it wouldn’t surprise me.
I still hate paypal after my country can allow to use their services
Hi Duncan.
This is a great opportunity to take advantage and promote their services. The same as when Skype had a problem and we try to use other products.
It is time to break some of the monopolies.
Mario Ruiz
http://www.oursheet.com
Mario,
Be carefull with the ‘other products’.
This is not just a IM like Skype. This is a bit more serious than that.
I agree with Mario — there is room for a parallel business opportunity.
And at the same time — things break — is it big news ??? Not unless it is a big juicy cover up — skype sort of falls into that category….
Pay Pal sucks anyway. Too much of the eBay culture has trickled down. To process millions and millions of transactions every day, account for almost 25% of eBay’s net income, and then have so few employees is ridiculous. Someone mentioned monopolies? A revolution is long over due.
I have made and received at least 3 subs (so 6 total) in the last 5 days with no problem. One was even refunded and no problem.
I’m a paypal user, and I have not experienced any problems.
HELL FUCKING YEA IM BEING EFFECTED! I GOT OVER 700 GODDAMN SUBSCRIBERS!! I GOT BILLS TO PAY TOO! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
I extended a Skype-In subscription using PayPal on 27 august and it is still pending even though PayPal confirmed receipt of payment. Who is getting the interest on my money?
Chris and Allen, I can assure you there are problems - I have over 500 missing payments now and my financial records are going tits up! 5 days out of business and I too have bills to pay, and kids to feed! Paypal better sort this asap, or I will be demanding some refund of a kind. I pay for a service as a business customer that I’m not getting!
Also can confirm that subscriptions are not working, and it’s causing my clients (and myself) serious headaches.
680 subscribers over 7 clients and what do I tell them??? 5 days to fix this! WTF!
This ain’t no hype, it’s fact and it’s a serious failure in PayPal’s system.
PayPal has got some explaining to do once they fix this as their reliability/credibility has taken a major hit.
My business is suffering as well. We are missing payments totaling over $3000. New subscriptions are working, however all payments have not rolled in whatsoever. This is a real headache. I just wonder about larger companies such as World of Warcraft for instance, who reports 9million users. I am not sure how many actually use paypal, but that would be an alarming number.
Does anyone know if paypal is sending the IPN notifications for renewals, even though they arent sending the cash?
What I mean is- If I someone sends a subscription payment today, normally paypal would give me that cash, then send a ping out to my website, telling me that it has received the cash at which point my website would extend the users priveledges or whatever. But is paypal sending those pings at least? Or are they not sending pings OR money? That would suck alot.
Are eBay going out of there way to annoy people who use their products in an enterprise/business?
First a mid-week Skype outage that is because of people doing the almighty rebooting of a computer and then businesses who use PayPal for subscription processing.
we have been seeing issues with the subscription service since we started using it. The IPN notifications seem to be sporatic and the timing is often slow. It’s created a ton of headaches for developers and the product lacks any type of flexibility in cancellations / extensions of trials, etc…
Not to worry, though. Paypal has a more powerful recurring payments product that started beta testing in March/April and will be ready in Q1 of 2008. 9 months for beta testing??? Come on Paypal.
Yes, problem definately exist. We have not recieved our subscription payments since Aug 30th and are loosing $$$ everyday! People who are saying that they are a paypal member and not having any problem, wouldn’t have the problem unless they are a subscription based merchant (like us) - so their is no need to tell us you are a user and have no problem… WE DO and there is a MAJOR PROBLEM!
We’ve been losing out on subscription payments since 8/30 also. I called all day Friday, and had the worst customer service experience of my life. And it took my blog post yesterday http://www.adam-mcfarland.net/.....f-my-life/ to actually prompt a reply from someone who could admit to me that there in fact was an issue (aside from the rep on the phone who just told me that other people are having problems too).
I wonder - why does it take a WEEK to fix something that has been working for a long time (at least 6 months for us)? And why does it take them 3 or 4 days to publicly admit to the problem?
I’m disappointed.
This issue is hitting us hard as well. I’ve called PayPal support and know one, even supervisors, had any idea this was going on. Didn’t seem to be too important to them, so I’m glad this post happened.
#20 im not saying there isnt a problem - just giving my experiences.
tho i will say that i can’t “accept” one payment - keeps going to a page with an html title tag of “not found” but its a page that says “retry” link and i click it and i get logged out - maybe thats the issue lol
PayPal has poor customer service. I’m shocked at the incompetence of some of their account managers. Even worse, there was no proactive messaging about the issue.
This came to my attention because a customer of mine was charged $5000 but my company didn’t credit his account. The reason why… PayPal reported to us that the payment failed even though they charged the customer’s card. I have heard from my PayPal account manager (I had to place the call) that there were issues going on from Wednesday the 28th because of a “software upgrade”.
Google Checkout should take advantage of this issue. We were looking into moving to google when they launched checkout, but they did not support subscriptions at the time…not sure if they do now - but if they don’t, it is a pretty good opening for them.
Yup, we’ve been seriously impacted. At current time, we have over 2600 subscribers via PayPal with the bulk of our subscriptions automatically renewing at the beginning of the month, which has just passed, and we budget accordingly. 95% of our income for our business comes in via PayPal subscriptions. Right now, we can’t pay our employees and pretty soon bills are going to start bouncing. In short, we’re screwed.
What’s even more upsetting is the poor manner in which PayPal has handled this issue. Honestly, we got better customer service when they had a mere handful of employees pre-eBay buyout.
Hey startups–here’s a niche that needs to be filled ASAP. Google checkout doesn’t even offer subscription payments yet. Anyone up to the task? You have the opportunity to ride in on your white horse and score a gaggle of disgruntled PayPal customers.
I heard rumors that paypal is cancelling subscriptions now.. VERY SCARY if thats the case.
If businesses are seriously hurt financially like #32 Amie Gillingham, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lawsuit is around the corner. Not something PayPal or eBay wants with Google lurking. Obviously Google Checkout isn’t anywhere near PayPal in market share but this may change some people’s minds.
I actually hadn’t noticed the problem until this post, although it hasn’t affected me too much as most of our subscribers are on yearly payment system.
I don’t understand why new subscriberes are still working though. We’ve had plenty of new subscribers since the outage and have received all of those payments.
Hadn’t heard about this until the blog post about it. I expect to see another big class-action lawsuit on the way.
https://www.paypaldeveloper.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=basicpayments&thread.id=11508
Ok, this is scary. If paypal is cancelling customer subscriptions, this could cause HUGEEE amounts of losses. Not losses like “Il just get paid 5 days late, no biggie” but losses like “I will never get paid- ever”
“Customer subscriptions are being cancelled by Paypal”
If that’s true, I can see it having a massively negative impact on paypals reputation. Let’s hope Google are working on replacing paypal with Gpay
YEP - no subscription payments for several days now.. Regular payments, new subscription payments, IPNs and cancellations are all working fine - just not seeing any automatically collected subscription payments for the last few days.
I called PayPal support yesterday and the rep, even though he hardly spoke english WAS aware of the problem, but when asked if all the payments would be applied to my account when the problem gets resolved, he had to ask his supervisor - The answer was YES, all back-payments would be passed along.. probably..
Considering the amount they charge me per transaction (which is outrageous IMHO) this is totally unacceptable!
I’m switching my customers over to optimalpayments.com; they’ve been around for years, similar recurring payments services, slightly better rates and guarantees, their only weak point is in accepting Amex.
Hi everyone.
I work at PayPal and wanted to let everybody know that we’re aware of this issue and have a team working on a fix as quickly as possible. Also, to address some of the concerns here, PayPal is committed to subscription payments. Our head of merchant products posted an update about this issue on The PayPal Blog, and he’ll post another update later today once we’re closer to resolution. http://www.thepaypalblog.com/w.....subsc.html
Yes, this is bad. Really bad and worse than you think. I can confirm that PayPal is automatically cancelling my subscribers. It’s a side effect of the subscriptions not being collected. The PayPal system isn’t collecting the money, then it says “oh, you haven’t paid, so now we’re going to cancel you.” I have had 12 cancellations just this morning. That’s more than I usually have in two weeks.
This reminds me of the old commercial, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs. Well, this is PayPal’s brains on drugs. Truly a pathetic company. I have been programming since I was 11. One thing that I have learned… Check your code!!!! Idiots. Truly amazing that this can happen at this level.
I’m glad at least we have implemented our own billing system about 6 months back and have been slowly converting older customers over to our own system. This will accelerate the process now. If we didn’t have an alternate billing system our company would probably be dead by now.
I had a subscription expire that I didn’t even know was a subscription until I got a paypal notice it was cancelled. I wouldn’t even have paid attention. Thanks for the update
@Sara
- What of the subscription cancellations?
Interesting…Does not bode well for eBay in light of the recent Skype outage.
We are also experiencing problems with PP subscription payments. Our records and testing seem to indicate that:
1) New Subscriptions are fine
2) One-time Payments are fine
3) Scheduled payments of existing subscriptions are being collected from subscribers, but the payments are not being deposited into our PP account, and the IPN (Instant Payment Notification) web service is not contacting our server for these payments.
4) PayPal does not appear to be canceling any of our users’ subscriptions, unless of course, the users request to cancel. Some other PP customers have speculated that PayPal is canceling their subscriptions (this would be a mega-scandal).
We have been fairly happy with PayPal, but we did report an issue one week ago and still have not heard back (even after contacting them a second time). Their IPN web-service contacted our IPN-processing system as usual, but when we posted back to their server we got a non-standard response. This problem only happened on two payments out of thousands so far, so we’re not overly concerned.
Wow! for those people running a business, that don’t have the means to float yourself for 1 week without the income from paypal, you should probably think about how you are running your business. i’m not saying paypal is not at fault, but it’s called a savings account and it’s good insurance for times like this when you have to pay bills or feed your kids. it’s not like paypal is stealing your money, it will get to you eventually. just think. what if you had to wait for the mail to show up?
Man… THIS IS F….. BS.. I DO 6000$ A month in transactions, paying these sob’s about 250$ in paypal fees, each month to do so. I hate myself for not going with a different merchant, buying into this paypal shit was a big problem orginally. However now, I have to wait 5-7 days for my payments to go through? WTF COME ON… Do your job paypal. You need to stop everything your doing and get your asses back into the office, and repair this issue immediatly. SOME PEOPLE need to pay bills. AND PAY BILLS ON TIME! If you continue to let this shit slip, you are going to lose almost every customer you have. I pay my bills on time, I expect to get paid on time (SO THAT I CAN PAY THEM).. If your shit merchant cant do it, then I will have to find another company that will. Get your shit together, I’ve got a business to run. I think a class action lawsuit is in order.
We’ve confirmed that there are no subscription cancellation issues in our system. This seems to be an isolated incident, and our team is following up directly to address it.
My web hosting firm has been unable to collect our subscription payments since yesterday. There’s a lot of angry customers too because they’re reporting their subscriptions have appeared to have been cancelled.