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Worldwide Outage Stymies PayPal Customers

By Will McCahill, Newser Staff

Posted Aug 3, 2009 7:00 PM CDT

(Newser) – Online pay service PayPal was down for about five hours today, the Wall Street Journal reports, potentially derailing millions of transactions. A rep for parent eBay attributed the outage to an “internal network hardware issue,” and couldn’t say how many customers were affected; PayPal has previously said it processes about $2,000 in transactions each second.

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An eBay/PalPal sign stands outside eBay offices in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo)

PayPal items for sale are seen at eBay headquarters in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo)

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Everyone is working flat out to fix it. We are looking into how to address our affected merchants. - PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar

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