PayPal suffers from e-commerce outage
eBay's online payment system suffered outages for about two hours Monday, but the company says it's working for most people again.
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PayPal suffered a global outage and slow performance Monday, but eBay said its online payment system is mostly back in working order.
"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," said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar in a blog post about noon PDT. "We're really sorry for the inconvenience."
An update at 12:40 p.m. said the site was working again for most users.
Nayar said in an interview the outage was global and the worst of the outage lasted about an hour total, though the site wasn't fully recovered just before 2 p.m. PDT.
$2,000 per second in transactions
The outage could be costly for those who rely on PayPal to handle e-commerce transactions. PayPal says about $2,000 in payments per second flows through the system, meaning that a one-hour outage would cut out about $7.2 million in commerce.
Nayar 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 through PayPal's application programming interface (API), which lets applications use the service without having to go through the Web site. It first noted the problem at 10:41 a.m. PDT.
Updated with more details at 2:04 p.m. PDT.