PayPal acknowledged an outage on Friday that impacted buyer’s ability to buy goods. It appeared the problem was widespread for up to several hours and then became intermittent. However, the problem continued to impact some users throughout the weekend.
Sellers who encountered the technical issue on Friday were greeted with an error message when trying to access their accounts: “We’re having some trouble completing your request. Please try again shortly.”
Over the weekend, some users encountered a screen that red, “Access denied – you don’t have permission to access PayPal on this server.”
Both buyers and sellers said they were unable to login to PayPal and turned to the usual forums to report problems, including IsItDownRightNow, DownDetector, Twitter, and Ecommerce EKG. They also reported the problem on discussion boards on sites including eBay and Etsy.
Sellers also reported being unable to print postage labels necessary to ship their items and were unable to pay their selling fees.
A PayPal spokesperson provided EcommerceBytes with the following statement on Friday afternoon: “We are aware that some customers are unable to access their account. We are working on this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.”
The company pronounced the problem resolved at about 4:30 pm ET on Friday, though some users reported some lingering issues after that.
Reports of problems gained traction again on Saturday and Sunday.
One buyer tweeted a description of the problem to PayPal’s customer service Twitter account on Sunday afternoon, and wrote 20 minutes later, “I need to make a payment and the seller is still waiting…”
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