PayPal suffers global outage and performance woes

PayPal suffered a global outage and slow performance on Monday but eBay says its online payment system is mostly back in working order.

A PayPal spokesman said in a blog post at about 12:00(PDT) yesterday: "About an hour ago, PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money. We have all hands on deck to get this fixed. We're really sorry for the inconvenience."

An update at 12:40 said the site was working again for most users.

The spokesman said in an interview that the outage was global and the worst of the outage lasted about an hour in total.

The outage could be costly for those who rely on PayPal to handle ecommerce transactions. PayPal says about $2,000 in payments per second flows through the system, meaning that a one-hour outage would cut out about $7.2m in commerce.

He declined to comment immediately about whether sellers would be compensated in any way or how eBay handled such decisions in the past.

As a key driver of growth for eBay, PayPal is becoming more important at the online commerce and auction site.

"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," eBay chief executive John Donahoe said in July. And through a developer release in July of a new PayPal payment system, eBay wants to refashion the service to enable a new generation of online commerce.

PayPal's developer site said the outage hit not just its web page but also PayPal's application programming interface (API), which lets applications use the service without having to go through the website. It first noted the problem at 10:41(PDT).

Original article: PayPal suffers from e-commerce outage from CNET News.com