There’s a mad rush of tips coming into us right now that PayPal’s online purchasing service is down for the count. While the site itself appears to be loading (though very slowly), numerous buyers and venders are reporting that sales are not going through. A quick scan of Twitter tells the same story. And it looks like it has been down for something like an hour and a half now.
[Update below, it looks like after something like 2 hours of downtime, the service is starting to come back.]
Here’s what PayPal is officially saying on its developer site:
EVENT DETAILS
——————–
Service: Live SiteDuring the time listed below you may have or currently are experiencing the following:
Buyers may experience error “Sorry – your last action could not be completed” on trying to login to www.paypal.com.
Payments via API are intermittently unavailable.Affected Product(s):
- Website
- PayPal APIsStart Time: Aug 03, 10:15 AM PDT (Aug 03, 6:15 PM BST)
End Time: On-Going
Our technical teams are working diligently to resolve the issue. We will provide updates until the issue is resolved.
We apologize for any impact caused by this incident.
Sincerely,
PayPal Merchant Technical Services
So there you go, both the main site and the all-important PayPal APIs are not working. Not good.
It will be interesting to see how PayPal follows this up. A lot of merchants undoubtedly lost a lot — and I mean a lot — of money today. When Rackspace had its recent failures, it noted that it would likely have to reimburse customers to the tune of millions of dollars. eBay, which owns PayPal, could be looking at a similar situation.
Update: As of noon PT, things are starting to come back online. Here’s the update from PayPal:
Update: This notification is to inform you that we have started recovering. Some intermittent issues remain which we are currently addressing.
Single point of failure for online economy. Me no likey.
eeek this means many business lost a lot of business because of the payment processors problem!
It just worked for me. Hopefully it sorts itself out for others soon. A lot of money is gonna be lost.
as of a few minutes ago, they are reporting that the system is starting to come back online.
As of a few minutes ago, the paypal UK site dropped off the net completely. If that’s ’starting to come back online’ then I’d hate to think how bad it would have to be for them to admit it was actually broke..
sometimes it pays-off not to process payment transactions in real time
It’s a pretty bad idea for any business to leave themselves with a single point of failure.
http://www.w3roi.com and all our other ecommerce sites accept at least two payment methods, such as PayPal and direct credit card payment. Some accept Amazon Flexible Payments as well.
Most site owners have learned to keep backups and even backup hosting in case of a host going down, they need to learn to have a backup payment processor as well.
With Google Checkout, Amazon FPS and other 3rd party processors out there, there’s little excuse not to have multiple accounts and processes tested and ready to go.
Spot on and I totally agree. All tech execs should know this.
Don’t forget Google Checkout and Amazon Stupid Acronym Service.
++ TLA
I just bought something on PayPal. It was slow but it worked.
through what site?
I just paid for something on ebay UK with paypal, using the built in paypal checkout frame.
Rogue Amoeba, for Airfoil.
It probably depends on how the site is implementing the API.
Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing, some reports of things okay, but many more of failures.
Geez.. I was wondering what was going on with my two ecommerce sites. Kept getting failed payment emails; surely Paypal would have emailed me first before I found out this way?
James F.
Owner, TwitterBackground.com – Free Twitter backgrounds
Funny how they were up just long enough to put a hold on my funds due to an unauthorized payment by an eBayer.
working fine for us.
There are going to be a lot of unhappy online merchants. Would hate to be customer support at Paypal.
There is no customer support at PayPal.
hehe.
You got that right. I’ve wasted hours on the phone with them…horrible customer service!
I just bought something online via PayPal with no problem.
Man I just bought 2009 Lamborghini and now I can’t pay for it.
Well to bad for the buyer!
JK!!!
Paypal worked just fine for me this morning, bought few stuff off ebay.
Yeh you’re right, too bad for you.
+1
Tried repeatedly to pay for some items & just get an error page. You can log in OK but attempting to pay for anything just falls over.
Correct. Looks like the transaction system is down.
Worse.. I actually got the ‘you have paid’ page, but nothing on the transaction history, ebay think I haven’t paid.. so, have I paid or not?
This is the first time I ever recall them having an outage. Anything humans have built will fail. Even with redundancy there is always a weak link somewhere.
How about a 3 (or something) day outage in 2004 (if I recall it right, maybe 2005) when they were ’scaling’ the server farm?
early October 2004:
http://www.auct...y04/m10/i18/s02
also the weekend immediately after i left the building. (sorry, didn’t mean to kick the plug on the way out the door
That is why I never authorize cards online. Rather, I do a simple LUHN check (mod 10) and authorize the card offline after the order is placed.
Seriously, I never lose an order when the payment gatways fail.
Gotta love the scalability of the internet, when things go wrong, they go REALLY wrong, I guess at least it keeps things interesting…
Several sites I visit have also been down today (and some yesterday). For instance, Lifehacker (Gawker, etc.) haven’t been loading for me at all, in two days.
The irony of Twitter reporting other site failures.
lol
We are one of those clients who has lost a lot of money today…for us, an hour’s worth of lost processing on a Monday is a major, major financial burden.
My store was/is also not able to collect payments right now, not good! Sucks having to find out through TechCrunch there was a problem too (I came here to submit a tip about it). This much downtime is not good for business!
How will I sell my dolphin figurines on eBay?
4chan is to blame !
Google checkout is the best. Paypal is CRAP!
Except for the fact that their reporting absolutely blows. Try and reconcile your accounting on a monthly basis if you have any kind of decent monthly transaction totals. I’m definitely not the only one complaining, check out this thread on Google’s own Checkout forum:
http://www.goog...d3c37&hl=en
And… from what I can tell, you never get a ‘live’ response. You get a verification 15 minutes after someone places an order indicating whether the payment was good or invalid. You get an immediate notification that a payment was made, but not its validity.
When using Google Checkout every buyer have the possibility to cancel his order during 15 minutes. (not for digital goods though)
This is why you only get the risk info and why the order enters the chargeable state 15 minutes after the order was placed.
http://code.goo...l_Commands.html
We will soon giving a taste on how the PayTC can truly revolutionize online payments. Stay tuned to test drive the PayTC with your own USB token. Go to kanatait.com and see our video.
Hernan M
Good luck with that!
Been down now over 4 hours for me. One item I want, can’t buy it, all day. Even when paypal works, one would think there’s plenty of room in this space for improvement (read: any system for making payments one-to-one, that doesn’t suck or take a huge cut).
Can I receive money in Paypal without linking a credit card
FYI, as the CFO for our company, I see that we process close to 2.8 million dollars per year in ecommerce transactions through paypal (via their merchant account – not just express checkout). I will also add that we had a $19,000 ad campaign breaking TODAY. The result? We are losing TONS of money because we cannot process payments via our ecommerce site, and customers are abandoning their shopping carts as a result.
I called paypal to ask to speak with someone in upper management. Instead, I had the pleasure of speaking a minimum wage robot (yes, you know the type) who was rude and unhelpful.
I will broadly say that paypal is a lame giant. Dumb employees, and obviously dumber management. It would appear that they are so big, they could care less if they piss anyone off at all. Sigh. This sucks.
You do $2.8 million a year in sales and use PayPal for your payment system?! As much as I loathe PayPal I have to say any money you lost today is your own fault for being that stupid.
You should have a way to bypass having to go through the PayPal gateway during checkout in times like these.
Seriously, take the order and just authorize the credit card once PayPla is back online.
I posted a comment a few above you (do a simple LUHN check (mod 10) and authorize the card offline after the order is placed).
This is eCommerce 101.
http://www.yout...h?v=gwPoM7lGYHw
PP UK still totally down !
Same here. Also not able to collect payments via Paypal for almost two hours. Not good on a Monday.
It’s Anuj from PayPal. We are really sorry about this. We’ve got all hands on deck and the site should be up and running for most users. I’m posting updates to http://www.thepaypalblog.com as we know more and we’re also tweeting from @PayPal.
It’s Anuj from PayPal. We’re really sorry about this. The site is up and running now for most users. I’m updating the PayPal blog with more info as we get it. Also tweeting from @PayPal.
Given that payment through ebay is as bad as it was earlier (in fact worse, since login fails about 50% of the time now too) I wonder who these ‘most users’ are.
Merely declaring the servers up doesn’t make it so.
I’m unable to view transaction detals (”problem loading page”), but just sent an invoice with no problem.
My other payment processor is ProPay.com for my coaching services, but for my products, it’s all PayPal. Boo PayPal.
Regarding your update, payments through the API are still not going through (at least for us).
PayPal works for us and we’re receiving payments.
We have a monitoring service which tests PayPal and Google Checkout with dummy transactions every 10 minutes. There have been no errors reported at all.
Hey all,
Check us out at http://www.payproglobal.com for alternative solution if you are selling software online.
This will allow you to use a really advanced ecommerce solution with close attention that 99% will increase your revenue in 5% or more with close attention and marketing activity from our sides when we sell your softwares.
feel free to contact us with any questions.
Regards,
Dana
WE SELL TINY TIGERS, this downtime potentially costed us millions of dollars!
Mental note… when testing/releasing new APIs make sure they don’t take down core application functionality. Got it.
I’ve been eBay and PayPal free for about a year now. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to be happier. Also a great way to lower blood pressure!
as a user or a site owner?
We recommend PayPal and Authorize.net to our ecommerce clients.
Authorize.net went down for a few hours a couple weeks ago. Now PayPal goes down for a bit. Seems you’d have these issues with any payment gateway, even the biggies.
yeah, for some reason it’s only the little sites that can manage five nines.
I just read that the problem was due to “a server” going down. Whatever happened to fault tolerance? …is everything just a single server away from a major outage?
I’ve been out of IT for a while, if my question is boneheaded, I’ll accept the flame.
Redundancy is a fancy word but when it comes to reality and failure of network equipment (as in this case), it is almost impossible to predict and cover every failure mode. For example, if network gear starts to fail causing routing failures you have a situation that where 1) The failure mode is very hard to detect automatically 2) Very hard to resolve through automatic failover.
Amazing that people claim to hate paypal, but yet the company thrives. I personally, ditched them for business as they’re lacking in customer service, hold funds hostage and basically just suck when it comes to transactions. Though I keep an account open, its so rarely used, I wonder often if it’ll be there should I ever decide to use it. None the less, if merchants took advantage of some of the other third party processors and ditched this behmoth along with ebay and their blather, or better yet, some bright young financial wizard build a better mousetrap, then the interwebs would surely be a better place. As for me and mine, we use amazon payments, google (sometimes but rarely) propay and virtually anything but paypal. Times like this a little common business sense (why give away the profits to pp?) makes good sense indeed
Another reason why PP customers need to start making some big noises about who IS NOT making money with a PP account. Who ALWAYS loses with PP —– their customer account holders. PP makes tons of money, account holders lose out, period.
guess websites should all have a fallback payment system in the future; good for competition
but, for now, and for those who depend upon it, the experience was just plane (and poetically) awkward – http://web-poet.../08/03/awkward/
Looks like paypal is down AGAIN. This follows a recent string of DDOS attacks including attacks on Payoneer, elance and others.
Looks like someone is out to prove the online economy is extremely vulnerable, we an only hope that the websites affected take this as a cue to beef up their security but I fear this is unlikely, after all this is not the first time events like this have transpired.