Note: PayPal’s APIs are now in the process of recovering.
For the past hour and 45 minutes, PayPal has been experiencing some downtime.
The company has posted on its blog and verified the outage over Twitter. PayPal says it is continuing to work to resolve the issue.
The outage, which started at approximately 8:07 a.m. PT, is related to PayPal’s API. That means that some users are having a hard time logging into their accounts and sending or receiving money from PayPal.
PayPal’s Live Site Status blog says that users might experience API timeouts and messages like, “Sorry – your last action could not be completed” on paypal.com.
Because this is an API issue, PayPal says the following services and products are affected:
- PayPal APIs
- Website
- Website Payments Pro Payflow Edition
In other words, if you are trying to use a site that either uses PayPal as its payment processor or uses PayPal’s APIs for payment processing, you might experience some problems trying to complete a transaction.
As The Next Web notes, this sort of downtime is likely to reflect more poorly on PayPal’s customers — its merchants — rather than on PayPal itself. If a potential customer can’t complete a purchase, the first instinct is to blame the merchant, not the payment service the merchant uses.
Of course, to be fair, the same is true when credit card and banking point of sale systems go down in retail stores. It’s no more the fault of Best Buy or a seller on Etsy if a payment processor is experiencing downtime, but the end result is that customers and merchants have a more difficult time completing transactions.
PayPal has been updating its @PayPal and @AskPayPal Twitter accounts with updates. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
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