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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.
Get out your crystal balls. What effect do you think this will have on the share price of EBAY tomorrow? Will that constitute a buying or selling opportunity?
The first six or seven times I tried clicking through to this story slashdot told me "Nothing to see here. Move along." Problem in the subscription code?
Anyway this was bound to happen sooner or later. There's frankly no way to test large-scale use of a resource like that because in order to REALLY test it you have to exchange a lot of data with assorted financial institutions which will probably not be very forgiving about something like that. Paypal's never given me any trouble whatsoever and I think that not being able to use it for a day or so is acceptable. Not being able to access debit card funds could be a serious blow to someone foolish enough to store a lot of money in paypal, but otherwise it should have little impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
After listening to the talk, one came away wondering how the site even worked at all. Every day, you are on the bleeding edge and every day if you have the slightest of hiccups, expect to have it covered in the Wall Street Journal the next day.
I don't know what they paid that poor guy, but it isn't enough. I'm surprised he still has all his hair and it wasn't grey.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
from the msnbc article:
"When folks go to use their PayPal debit cards, the payment is rejected, but the charge actually goes through and PayPal is deducting the amount from their account"
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
Though a lot of posts on here are along the lines of "see...haha...paypal is not a bank!!" I for one am grateful that it isn't.
There are a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, who have been screwed out of getting a bank account from a regular bank. Because of negative reporting on chex systems, they can't get a regular checking account at all.
In tandem with a savings account (which you *can* sometimes get even with a bad chexsystems report) and a paypal account, you have essentially the same services of a checking account.
I for one got screwed by my bank (5/3rd) after fraud hit my account and they refused to take responsibility for some items. Thanks to paypal I still can have checking account like abilities until I sue my bank.
One of my friends has interviewed at PayPal and Ebay for the SCM and Build Engineer role. Because of the merger, he interviewed with the same technical lead twice.
A famous question is
"How do you remove all of the directories named "TEST" from the repository?"
Understanding best practices, the answer has always been
"Can't we just hide them, version control is there for a reason?"
The head of their team then explained
"No, who would name anything TEST that they wanted to need"
For the record he clarified that the job entails removing versions and files.
Its clear that best practice at Ebay/PayPal is to fly by the seat of your pants and hope it works. We all see how well that works now.
Whereas most banks will gladly take your money as long as it's legal, PayPal will shut you down if they don't like your politics.
Or so rumor has it.
Is anyone else profoundly bothered by this?
PayPal, which must deal handle millions of dollars a day, just goes down entirely. My real problem, though, is that they are not a real bank. (At least last time I checked) they are not FDIC Insured or anything. They could just never come back, and there's really not much anyone could do.
Not that I expect them to run off with my money. But in situations such as, say, the whole site going down, I like to know my money's in something that's insured.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
My luck never fails me. Today I ran out of clicks, hits, or whatever Slashdot calls there subscription "points". I also ran out on another website I "subscribe" to so I figured kill two birds with one stone.
So what do I do, I re-subscribe through paypal today and I did notice it was going a tad slow, but I didn't worry too much.
To be honest I thought it was a recent FW upgrade on my router I did the night before acting up. I reflashed back a version and everything seemed ok.
Anyways the issue: I was wondering why my subscription to Slashdot still wasn't showing up. My other subscription was paid within the same minute as the slashdot one, and it went through fine. Weird. As of 9:55pm PST it still hasn't "gone through" (BTW I am confident that it will be fixed and I know it's not Slashdot's fault)
After finding out about the problem, I can only wonder if the Slashdot payment will even go through. My real concern is my bank account being screwed up, I don't want to be billed for $5 in an endless loop.
~Your Friendly Neighborhood Anime Man
Went to a Wawa (it's a Philly area convenience store) to buy a sandwich for me and my wife. Total was $11, I have $15 in the account from an eBay auction I sold last week.
Selected debit- transaction denied. Selected debit again- transaction denied. Selected credit- this time it went through. (Otherwise I was just going to pay cash.)
When I checked my account when I got home, the balance was negative- they double-debited the transaction.
Now, I'm not worried- even my bank has made an error or two like this, and a call to customer service tomorrow should clear things up. And even if it doesn't, it's $11.
But I do feel very bad tonight for people depending on the money in that account. They're in a lot of trouble tonight.
if you blow your credit _really_ badly (ex., if you're a man and you divorice a woman), you're probably screwed for the next 10 years. So much so that you get stuck with services like paypal for a debit/credit card. What paypal's doing (and what they've always done) is take advange of people who aren't in a position to use a normal, legitimate business. This is why they get away with the shit they do. If you're using paypay, you probably don't have a heck of a lot of (better) alternatives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I just read the "Jobs at PayPal" page... Some of the more interesting new openings that have been updated today:
:)
Director, Software Infrastructure Architecture
Senior Software QA Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
Sounds to me like they're cleaning house after this one
bash: rtfm: command not found
I heard a news item the other day on the radio that banks all around the country are about to begin using a new system for verification of checks and that customers could no longer count on 'floating' of check for two or three days. I'd be willing to bet PayPal was upgrading their software to support this. It's estimated this change will put $2 billion more into the banking industry each year, largely in the form of fees on bounced checks and overdraft charges. There may be more such failures in the next few weeks.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Paypal isn't exactly known as the most reliable company. But are there any better alternatives out there, that have a good reputation? Are there any similar companies that also accept money from Asia countries (such as Malaysia and Phillippines), and don't charge $30 to transfer to an international bank account (I live in Europe, not US)?