PayPal blackout hits e-commerce

EBay-owned payments service PayPal has said that its vision is to become the “electricity” for e-commerce, i.e., the underlying technology for all payments on the web. So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that, as happens once in a while with electricity, PayPal experienced a blackout this morning.

PayPal posted on its blog about the outage, reporting that “PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money,” followed by an update at 12:40pm Pacific time that “The site is now up for most users.” Judging from the initial post, the site first went down at around 11am, making for an outage of about 100 minutes — not a long time, but given PayPal’s widespread use, this could represent a huge amount of lost money. The outage appears to be affecting some eBay transactions too.

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Not that PayPal is the only e-commerce system to experience technical troubles. About a month ago, online credit card and electronic check processor Authorize.net went down for about a day — but at least Authorize could blame a building fire. There’s no word yet on the cause of PayPal’s difficulties.

Some users are complaining on microblogging service Twitter about continuing problems. PayPal says it will keep people updated via its Twitter account, although the updates are sparse so far.

[image:flickr/bucklava]