Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
PayPal Inc. late this afternoon says it is making headway against the software glitch that has plagued its Web site since Friday, rendering it inaccessible at times for both buyers and sellers who use the PayPal electronic payment system. “We made progress today, and we've got eBay and PayPal technical teams working on this,” says Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal, which is owned by online auction giant eBay Inc. “We feel terrible about any disruption to anybody.” PayPal blames the problem on code updates the company installed late Thursday. These functioned well until traffic began to build Friday morning. “The capacity to handle traffic started to degrade as traffic increased,” says Pires. The company has been scrambling to fix the problem since. Earlier today, Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that monitors Web site performance, said the PayPal site was completely inaccessible in tests it ran at 1:30 p.m. Pacific time. These tests involved attempts to reach the site from 10 locations around the country. The intermittent nature of the problem, though, is such that others have been able to call up the site without delay at various times over the past few days. The problem has afflicted the entire PayPal plaftorm, not just buyers and sellers on eBay, Pires says. That means e-commerce merchants may have been affected along with individuals and small proprietorships that depend on eBay auctions for business. PayPal in recent weeks has launched a major strategic effort to attract more business from commercial businesses that sell merchandise on the Web (Digital Transactions News, Sept. 30).
