PayPal Addresses Service Interruption

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FEATURED POSTRichard Brewer-Hay / Monday, August 3rd, 2009

PayPal Addresses Service Interruption

All,
Scott Guilfoyle, SVP of Technology for PayPal, posted to the PayPal Blog this evening regarding Monday’s service interruption to PayPal customers.

Let me update you on what happened, and how we acted as quickly as possible to restore service. 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.

Nothing is more important than our relationship with our customers, and the trust you have in PayPal. Thanks for your patience today, and for using PayPal.

You can read the full post here.

Thanks,
RBH
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Ed / August 4th, 2009 at 5:12 pm

Hi Scott,
WOW,that sounds a little too scary to contemplate,Paypal with a worldwide glitche, thank god its sorted!

TTFN….Ed.

Amber / August 5th, 2009 at 8:11 am

This is a glaring example of why we should have an archive for eBay system announcements. Something we’ve already been told eBay won’t do.

We NEED to be able to point to an official eBay and/or Paypal announcement when glitches interfere with trading and cause potential transaction issues.

Richard Brewer-Hay / August 5th, 2009 at 10:16 am

@Amber,
Thanks for the feedback. However, one of the things I was impressed with on Monday was the number of public updates being posted to the official blog and then linked to from other social media outlets, Twitter, and blogs, etc.

I saw the following blog post addressing exactly that:
http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?id=3159

During the outage a blog on the site kept frustrated users informed with regular updates and once everything was fixed another post appeared apologising profusely and explaining what went wrong. The company’s developer community got its own blog.

Compare and contrast with the way banks deal with similar problems.

I know from bitter experience how difficult it can be to get any kind of explanation from them when their Web sites fall over. As a reporter you’re lucky if a spokesman answers the phone and if they do you’re unlikely to get much detail. It’s even more difficult for a customer, who has to spend hours on hold waiting for someone in a call centre to (maybe) explain what’s going on.

Additionally, you can find up-to-the-minute system announcements at the following locations:

eBay: http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml

PayPal: http://announcements.paypal.com/us/

Cheers,
RBH

TheBrewsNews / August 5th, 2009 at 11:24 am

RBH, this announcement is archived all over the internet so this specific issue isn’t the problem. I believe Amber’s point isn’t necessarily about this ONE announcement but rather about ALL announcements. When an eBay / PayPal glitch occurs, sometimes there is a public announcement if eBay / PayPal feel that the glitch is a system-wide problem and doesn’t just affect a certain percentage of users. But then that announcement quickly disappears.

I can understand eBay not wanting to have a year’s worth of glitch announcements posted for the viewing public. But why can’t eBay archive announcements for something like 60 days, the same amount of time a buyer can leave feedback, and even make those announcements only accessible to anyone who logs into the eBay site (so must be an eBay member)? What could possibly be the harm in that? And doing so would allow sellers to point buyers back to the announcement if the buyer communicated with the seller asking a question or making a complaint about an issue that was clearly an eBay generated problem and not the seller’s fault.

Too many times a seller has to bear the brunt of eBay’s glitches. Granted it doesn’t happen NEARLY as frequently today as it has in the past (or perhaps because I sell so much less now that in the past I don’t experience as many glitches) but it is still a very important issue for sellers that would take so little effort on eBay’s part to correct. Leave the system announcements posted for more than just a day or two.

Amber / August 6th, 2009 at 6:41 am

Thank you, Brews. That was, indeed, my point. We need to have a place where ALL eBay and Paypal glitches are archived for a minimum amount of time (corresponding with feedback or dispute windows). Not just the truly catastrophic ones.

eBay used to keep the system announcements up for a week or two. Now, they’re deleted within days, leaving sellers with no way to prove that an eBay or Paypal glitch ever happened. It’s all well and good that THIS time, the story is all over the internet (and yes, I was aware of that), but that doesn’t happen on a day to day basis. Which leaves eBay sellers with potentially angry customers who cannot prove their innocence because eBay has deleted the evidence.

Amber / August 6th, 2009 at 11:31 am

Update: Please check your link to eBay’s system announcements, Richard. The Paypal issue is already GONE. Had it been less publicized (as the majority of eBay and Paypal glitches are) sellers (and buyers) would now have NO way to reference an eBay or Paypal glitch that harmed their business or prevented them from paying for an item.

We need a minimal archive of system announcements–one located on the eBay site.

Richard Brewer-Hay / August 6th, 2009 at 1:13 pm

Thanks @Amber,
I received an email from Jennifer Colvin, who works in communications for PayPal Merchant Technical Services, regarding some of the above comments. I thought I’d share with you here:

One of the things my group does is send out announcements about issues affecting the site (such as the outage that happened earlier this week). These announcements are posted to various “system update” blogs that are linked from the PayPal Developer Community site. From this page, if you look on the right navigation bar down the page a bit you’ll see the link for the Live Site Status blog.

I noticed that some of the readers of eBay Ink were looking for sources of official announcements, and this is another resource. It’s not the most user-friendly format – the announcements are generated through the use of templates and posted automatically, so they obviously sound kind of mechanical. Here’s the post about the outage, as one example.

One of the things that I’m currently looking at is how we can better utilize this communication channel and make the messaging a little more user friendly.

Thanks to Jennifer for providing this information.

Cheers!
RBH

TheBrewsNews / August 6th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

RBH, thanks for the information. Since I am not a PayPal Developer (just an eBay seller) I would never have known to look at that URL if you had not told us. It is not the most user-friendly format (as Jennifer acknowledged) but it is certainly more useful than nothing at all.

Is there perhaps a similiar Live Site Status link (maybe on an eBay Developer blog) where we can find archived info for the eBay glitches and problems?

Amber / August 6th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

THANK YOU, RICHARD!!!

(Sorry, felt that was worth a shout.) :)

Now, if we had a corresponding eBay developer glitch report…

Concha Castaneda / August 7th, 2009 at 3:32 am

Just some more “disruptive innovation” for ya! One day Mr. Donahoe exclaims how important Paypal is in terms of carrying eBay…and the next day he undermines the importance of paypal. What a crock!

permacrisis / August 9th, 2009 at 10:44 pm

PR gaffe:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/169843

It’s no Texas Handbag Massacre, but it’s something.

formercanadianplatinumpowerseller / August 10th, 2009 at 8:07 pm

Why are ANY of the tech glitches on eBay/Paypal not posted on the System Announcements Board?

Sure, some of them are – but not all.

Why must we have to check an off site BLOG posting that not everyone is 100% sure that it exists and why isn’t there a link to it on ebay or Paypal?

Strange….

Enrico / July 4th, 2011 at 8:17 pm

great customer service