PayPal back after global fault hit every account Monday night

UPDATED Failure meant all transactions made after 5pm UK time appeared to 'vanish into thin air'

UPDATED - A spokeperson from Paypal has contacted Computing to claim that only some regions were affected by the fault which rendered transactions invisible to its users for many hours from 5th October,

"This technical issue did not hit every account in the world," said the spokesperson, although Paypal refused to state exactly which areas were affected.

However, comments below this story show Paypal users in both London and the UAE claiming to be affected, suggesting that the fault was global. Comments on other websites show users in the US were also affected.

Electronic payments platform PayPal appears to be working normally again this morning (6 October) after having been hit by a major global systems failure yesterday evening, lasting for several hours.

The fault rendered all new transactions invisible to both the sender and the recipient, meaning that money appeared to "vanish into thin air", in the words of one account holder.

Computing has now been supplied with official comment attributed to a PayPal spokesperson. The statement reads:

"PayPal's systems continue to securely process payments for our customers around the world. We have identified a technical issue that resulted in some payments not being immediately posted in a customer's PayPal account, but this issue is rapidly being resolved. We regret any confusion or inconvenience this delay may have caused and encourage anyone who may be experiencing an issue to contact PayPal customer support so we can help."

The use of the phrase "...is rapidly being resolved" suggests that PayPal has not completely resolved the issue yet. Computing is awaiting further, more specific updates as to the status of PayPal's capacity to display payments.

The PayPayl fault occurred at approximately 17.00 UK time yesterday, and hit every account in the world, according to a spokeswoman from the company's customer service team. "No one can see any transactions," she said. This included PayPal staff: "We can't see anyone's activity logs," she explained.

Users were not informed of the failure unless they contacted PayPal by phone, leaving PayPal "swamped" by complaints from every part of the world, with some customers making payments twice, believing that the error must have been theirs.

Asked why the company had not posted a warning on its website, PayPal told Computing last night that it "expected the problem would have been fixed [by now]".

The problem hit purchases made via PayPal on the platform of former owner, eBay. eBay's annual revenues are in the order of $18bn, which means that nearly $2m of transactions were being affected by the fault every hour.

Many other outlets accept PayPal payments, including Asos, Topshop, Zara, Argos, John Lewis, British Airways, and thetrainline.com.

PayPal's spokeswoman acknowledged that the fault lay in PayPal's internal systems. "It is our technical problem," she said, but was unable to confirm the nature of the fault, or what had caused it.

• Ironically, the system failure occurred only hours after PayPal was named as one of the most valuable global brands for 2015 by specialist consultancy Interbrand. PayPal made its debut entry on the Top 100 survey at 97.