Ina Steiner EcommerceBytes Blog
News and insight focusing on ecommerce.
by Ina Steiner, Editor of EcommerceBytes.com
Fri Mar 4 2016 12:43:06

eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

By: Ina Steiner

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People have been unable to access their PayPal accounts today, March 4th, 2016. We've yet to find acknowledgement of the problem by PayPal. (Note: as we were working on this blog post, it appeared the site was coming back online.)

Buyers said they can't checkout on Etsy, can't pay on eBay, and sellers said they can't purchase shipping labels or pay fees using PayPal.

ItDownRightNow and DownDetector show reports coming in as early as about 4 am ET on Friday morning, 

Sellers also reported the problem on Ecommerce EKG and on industry boards.

We've sent an inquiry to PayPal and will post updates as they become available. We'd be interested to know if all accounts were affected and what kind of impact it had on merchants' sales. Let us know if you can log in now, and how you estimate this issue impacted you.

Update 2:45 pm ET: No response from PayPal, but people are still reporting problems, and PayPal sent out the following email:

Live Site Status Update
Notification: We are experiencing a system issue which may be affecting login functionality on the PayPal Live Site. Please see the details below.

- PayPal Customers may be experiencing intermittent issues logging into www.paypal.com

- PayPal Merchants may be experiencing HTTP 500 errors while processing REST API calls

Our technical teams have been engaged and are actively troubleshooting the issue.
Sent Mar 4, 2016 02:12 PM CST by DBO
Start time: Mar 4, 2016 11:52 AM CST
At this time, there is no alternative work-around.

Update 4:10 pm ET: A PayPal spokesperson provided us with the following statement: "We are aware that some customers are unable to access their account. We are working on this issue and apologize for any inconvenience."

Update 7:40 pm ET: PayPal pronounced the problem resolved in the following email sent to users this evening: 

Live Site Status Update
Resolved: This issue has been resolved as of Mar 4, 2016 03:38 PM CST.
Sent Mar 4, 2016 05:50 PM CST by STC



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Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

This user has validated their user name. by: Shop and Ship

Fri Mar 4 14:27:14 2016

No problem accessing PayPal last night nor this morning, but I did notice that PayPal Shipping Label choices were significantly impaired - NO REGIONAL RATE and only 3 FLAT RATE.

After reading INA's post I was unable to access my own PayPal Account this afternoon. But Tech has offered an amusement: "Enter Code" which is an 8 Letter/Number key which grants the lucky user a new set of Codes to enter ad nauseum. SHOW ME THE MONEY!

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

This user has validated their user name. by: RKTOYS

Fri Mar 4 15:46:29 2016

Aren't modern error messages great?  It's always "oops, try again" no matter what's actually wrong.

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

This user has validated their user name. by: iheartjacksparrow

Fri Mar 4 15:57:37 2016

I printed out some mailing labels in PayPal's MultiOrder Shipping around 10:30 a.m. PST and had no problem logging in or printing the labels. I also noticed yesterday that PayPal has finally added 14, 15 and 16 ounces to the First Class Package options. Now, if they'll just add an option for the Flat Rate Padded Envelope....

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

by: gizmo This user has validated their user name.

Fri Mar 4 16:47:46 2016

Likely updating programing. The usual response.

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

by: Opalie This user has validated their user name.

Fri Mar 4 23:46:35 2016

This is NOT resolved. Had it this morning then after a while I was able to login. Now hours later it's started saying access denied again.
For an entity that handles our money this is NOT acceptabel

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

by: JQ This user has validated their user name.

Sat Mar 5 14:20:17 2016

I could not log into Paypal for about an hour yesterday morning. The problem for me was fixed around Noon CST. I did not receive any e-mail messages from Paypal regarding the problem or that it had been corrected.

I noticed the screen layout now looks different (I use Chrome browser). I assume the site crashed when they were installing unhelpful cosmetic changes without warning or testing.

Perminate Link for eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage   eBay, Etsy and Online Merchants Hit by PayPal Outage

by: val2525 This user has validated their user name.

Mon Mar 7 01:21:38 2016

It's still having issues tonight. I kept getting error messages when I'd try to acces the 'show payments received' function.

Donohoe is in charge of PayPal. I'm not at all surprised at the problems. And I fully expect there to be more - LOTS MORE.



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