Paypal Outage Causes Severe Financial Loss to Over 100 Millions Clients Globally. Problem Still Not Resolved

Paypal, the leading online payment system, crashed yesterday June 1, 2007. Since the early hours of Friday, they have been frantically trying to fix their system, but to no avail. Paypal have been flooded with emails and phone calls, to which mostly have gone unanswered. Then at 11:44 AM.PDT on June 1^st, Paypal issued a statement on ebay.com, saying, "We are currently experiencing site issues that are resulting in customers being unable to login. This is a known issue that we are working to resolve. Thank you for your patience regarding this matter" Then at 1:32 PM PDT another statement from Paypal was issued on eBay saying, "This issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience regarding this matter." However contrary to their statement, the issues were not resolved and hundreds of eBay buyers and sellers responded to Paypal's Statement with anger and panic. Paypal holds the seller's money in their online banking system and therefore if their system crashes so does your money and it cannot be accessed from a debit card or transferred a bank account, or used to make payments with.

A Paypal Spokeswoman, Amanda Pires issued a global statement late Friday evening stating, "The problem has to do with our database, and now the site is up and running with full functionality and we have a dedicated team to diagnosis the issues and its causes." Yet, according to my own experience and thousands of others on eBay, the Paypal system is still down. In the meantime, eBay sales are at an all time low, and sellers are in an uproar! Thousands of auctions are ending without being sold because buyers cannot access their Paypal accounts. Sellers are scrambling to withdraw their money from their accounts and business is hurting severely. Paypal is a subsidiary owned by EBay. It is the largest and most widely used e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. Paypal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other corporate users, for which it charges a fee. -Paypal.com.

Thousands of websites are dedicated to the praise and despise of Paypal. However since this global outage, sites such as paypalsucks.com and.paypalwarning.com have been flooded with users outraged at Paypal's inability to fix this major problem. It has now been 2 days and Paypal still cannot seem to resolve their site problems. Another statement from Paypal was issued early this morning stating, "We are having major database problems coupled with ssevere hacking. It is a major problem and we are working on this, it should be resolved by Monday June 4^th. I can't imagine the financial loss for sellers globally.

EBay is the only company with Paypal as their primary source for online payments, and eBay users are the largest users of Paypal. According to eBay their company has over 100 million users. Since EBay bought Paypal in 2002, eBay has required every EBay user to have a Paypal account. . Paypal operates in 103 markets (including China). Paypal allows customers to send, receive and hold funds in 17 currencies worldwide. These currencies are the U.S. Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Australian Dollar, Euro, Pounds Sterling, Japanese Yen, Chinese RMB, Czech Koruna, Danish Crone, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Crone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, and Swiss Franc. Paypal's annual revenue for 2006 fiscal year was over 11Billion dollars. For a company that is in 103 countries and makes over 11 Billion a year, you would think they could fix a simple database problem in a timely manner. So far, there is no telling what kind of financial devastation this global outage has wrought upon Paypal clients, but only time will tell.