PayPal subscription payment service failure
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Let’s look at some past failures, Skype, WGA servers, Monster.com losing customer information and now parts of PayPal are offline. The PayPal subscription payment service went down August 30 and remains down. PayPal expects a fix to be in place by September 5 or 6 but hopes to have everything back to normal within 24 hours (which would be Labor day, don’t bet on it).
According to CenterNetworks when people have been trying to “accept” payments it has been going to a “Page Not Found” error. The person contacted support only to be supplied with the following response,
“Thank you for contacting PayPal.
Hello my name is Reimer, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding accepting an ‘unclaimed’ payment, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue. I am happy to assist you with your questions.
Unfortunately, that error is a known issue that is already being worked on by our technical personnel and we are still waiting for any updates about the timeframe for the fix. At the moment the suggested work around is to deny the payment and have it re-sent to the other email address in your PayPal account.
We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter, and wish you continued success on PayPal.
Sincerely,
Reimer
PayPal Community Support, PayPal, an eBay Company”
The problem here is that PayPal has not bothered to notify anyone about the problems say by posting a message on the homepage to the effect of “The PayPal subscription payment service is currently malfunctioning, we are working on a fix, thank you for your patience.” I guess that would just make too much sense. There is however a post on the PayPal blog about the problem(s).
Even though the system is partially down, scheduled subscriptions are still being tracked so payments will not be missed, however, payouts will be delayed until the problem is fixed. The PayPal team is working on a fix as fast as they can (either that or they’re hanging out playing Wii sports and eating pizza).
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on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 2:18 pm
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