PayPal goes offline for an hour, $7.2 million worth of transactions don’t happen

by admin August 5, 2009 at 12:10 pm

On Monday the world’s largest online Internet payment service went offline for a little over an hour causing a major headache for users of the service. At a reported $2000 worth of transactions being handled by the service every single second that translates to millions in lost transactions (roughly $7.2 million). The outage not only affected the PayPal website, but anyone using the PayPal API, meaning this was a total shutdown.

Writing on The PayPal Blog Scott Guilfoyle, SVP of Technology for PayPal, explained what happened:

At around 10:30 am PT Monday, a network hardware failure resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide. Everyone in our organization focused immediately on identifying the issue and getting PayPal up and running again. We accomplished that in about an hour. By approximately 3 pm PT, full service was restored across our platform.

We’re now working to fully understand how we can prevent such a service interruption from ever happening again. We’re also reaching out to merchants to discuss the impact this interruption had on their businesses.

Read more: geek.com