PayPal Service Disruption Continues In UK

A network hardware failure on Friday at one of PayPal’s data centres resulted in a service disruption for all of PayPal’s worldwide customers, the company has acknowledged.

While the company said all services had been restored by Friday afternoon, some users reported that as of Monday problems were persisting in the UK, particularly with the systems customers use to buy Royal Mail and Parcelforce postage.

Postal services disrupted

Several UK users, speaking to various UK news outlets and on user forums, reported that as of Monday they were still unable to buy postage via PayPal.

The outage developed on Friday morning Pacific Time, and was followed by a second disruption in the late morning that lasted until early on Friday afternoon, PayPal said.

“At around 08:07 am PT today, a network hardware failure in one of our data centres resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide,” said PayPal chief technology officer Scott Guilfoyle in a Friday blog post. “We were not able to switch over to our back up systems as quickly as planned. We partially restored service by approximately 8:45 am PT and the issue was fully resolved by 9:24 am PT.”

He said a second interruption began to develop at around 11:30 a.m. PT and was fully resolved by 12:21 p.m.

“We are investigating ways to ensure that this doesn’t happen again,” Guilfoyle wrote.

PayPal had still not resolved its UK postal service issues on Monday, according to a forum post by a PayPal customer on the IT news website PC Pro.

“I can also confirm the UK PayPal postage system is broken,” the customer wrote. “This is a major problem that PayPal still say is OK.”

New products

PayPal claims to have more than 87 milion active accounts in 190 countries and 24 currencies.

Last month the company said it would launch a micropayments platform that will allow consumers to purchase goods and content online. Facebook is the marquee customer for PayPal X for digital goods which, when it launches later this year, will enable the payment platform’s 90 million users to pay for games, music or video content from Websites in two clicks.

In August the service introduced PayPal Mobile 2.5, a new version of its application for Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The updated version of the PayPal app allows users to donate to their favourite charities.

The 2.5 version of the application, announced on 18 August, allows users to donate to more than 23,000 charities in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, PayPal said at the time.