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Paypal Grinds To A Halt
BillBrasky writes "After a 'Monthly Software Update', it appears that PayPal started having problems. There were reports all weekend of troubles, and as of Monday night here, I can't access it at all (connection time out). One user even reported that his PayPal Debit card was getting refused!" A message on the site now says the site is expected to be back at 8:10 PM PDT, not long from now.
How much negative feedback will be left on ebay due to user stupidity? The world wonders...
Of course, if the price drops tomorrow, it's probably the best time to buy in, since this is obviously a temporary glitch.
While it may be a temporary glitch, there is no doubt that such an outage has a real financial impact - banking, which PayPal is to a degree, is based upon trust, and PayPal already starts in a precarious situation given that there are no branches to visit and limit options available outside of their website. This is the sort of thing that sends grandmas and grandpas away from that payment method for a while.
This is why real banking institutions have such stringent operational guidelines set down my the federal government in regards to information systems. This should serve as a hearty wake-up call to a great many people that have fallen under the impression that Paypal is a "real" bank, when in fact they are not.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
1) As soon as someone pays you, move ALL the money out of your PayPal account.
2) To pay someone else, have payment go directly from your associated checking account. There is no need to carry a positive balance on PayPal.
3) Don't get the goddamn DEBIT card.
BTW, it's 8:37PT and it took almost 3 minutes to sign on. My guess is that PayPal will be hiring soon.
Humor aside, I have to say, banks do crash.
I have a bank run ccard/merchant acceptance interface. About every week I get emails with statements like "Unscheduled down time" or "Delay in payment acceptance" etc. The key difference is that the banks are entirely accountable and the transactions do actually go through ultimately. Furthermore, you have the ability to phone them or visit them personally should you have any issues.
Again, the key here is accountability.
PLD.
Well, I got in. It looks like PayPal is responding, but REALLY slowly. A couple of points of interest:
1. The front page is LOADED with new graphics and text.
2. There's now a "Powered by Sun" icon on the site.
What I'm wondering is if PayPal didn't overrun their bandwidth with new graphics and pages while simultaneously trying to upgrade the backend systems. The "intermittent problems" might have been caused by such an upgrade. Then Monday hits and they haven't completed upgrading/stress testing the system. What happens? Nose dive!
If my theory is correct, we can expect the performance to slowly improve as PayPal gets more systems online. Also keep an eye on that front page to see if any sudden changes show up.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yet another reason this unregulated global banking monopoly has to get some competition, immediately. The ecommerce world cannot afford to rely on this single point of failure, either accidentally or at their discretion.
--
make install -not war
You think that Paypal is doing business on an unprecedented scale? Sure, maybe in the U.S., banks don't handle as much of a load, seeing as there are a million different branches... but look at credit card companie, and how there is never any downtime in their systems. You think that VISA's billing department, or the credit verification department, or many others don't do the same amount of business as PayPal? (if not more) Most of the comments are right - you don't try to implement a new interface or a new system without extensive load testing... If you can't do extensive load testing, you have to either phase things in VERY slowly, or scrap the update until the testing can be done.
I would hope we couldn't blame serving up static content as a cause; there are so many cache servers built for this task in 2004 that one would hope actual web servers never actually see these requests.
If my theory is correct, we can expect the performance to slowly improve as PayPal gets more systems online
Nah...if it's bandwidth-related, performance will take another hit as more systems come online and try to share a saturated pipe.
However, if the problems WERE bandwidth related, it should be easy for eBay to diagnose; just take a meter reading of traffic before the crappy performance and another after. Likewise, it should be easy for eBay to diagnose server performance problems - just look for the spike.
I think what is troubling to every PayPal user is not that PayPal/eBay is having problems, but that they appear to have no idea what is broken and no idea how to fix it.