PayPal users experience disruption worldwide

Hardware failure leaves users unable to pay online

PayPal has 87 million active accounts

Friday 29 October saw internet payments system PayPal experience hours of disruption to its service due to a hardware failure in one of its datacentres.

Two separate interruptions occurred, resulting in about two-and-a-half hours of downtime for customers attempting to carry out transactions online.

“At around 8:07am pacific time (PT), a network hardware failure in one of our datacentres resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide,” said PayPal CTO, Scott Guilfoyle, in a blog.

“We were not able to switch over to our back-up systems as quickly as planned. We partially restored service by 8:45am PT and the issue was fully resolved by 9:24am PT,” he added.

Following this a second fault occurred at 11:55am PT, which was resolved at 12:21pm.

However, hours after the second problem was reportedly fixed, comments continued to be posted on the blog complaining that the UK was still experiencing problems. This has yet to be confirmed by PayPal.

PayPal has 87 million active accounts in 190 markets across the world.