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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.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Maybe not the smartest place to have put my life savings?
They have to deal with a slashdotting.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6228586/
msnbc also has an article about the outtages
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.'"
...most sites that rely on paypal (donations to stay up) don't really get donations anyways. Hard to bring a non-existant economic action to a halt ;-)
hehe I'm a silly goose.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
I just got an email from them asking me to verify my account information and it was working just fine!
The ones that tell me I need to log in to my account because of the possible security problem and the URL is to a server in Korea.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
This is just one of their ways of telling people they are not a bank. :)
The next time they get into trouble for not following banking rules they can say
"See, we're not a bank...banks don't crash"
How much negative feedback will be left on ebay due to user stupidity? The world wonders...
PayPal reports problem. We slashdot them.
I know we hate them and all, but why can't we take just a little bit of sympathy?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Thats funny, I never had problems with my paypal account. I get emails all the time from them asking me to verify my account at secure websites like paypal.reallysecure.tk. Sometimes they even send me a utility, paypalbuddy.exe, to keep my computer secure. I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
The only thing Paypal should really focus on now is training their likely outsourced software engineers in proper grammar. Samir is constantly sending me emails about my paypal account though for some reason he can never get some english phrases right. I guess its ok though, I cant expect the entire world to speak english, and I give him an E for effort, especially on those unique poems he attaches to the end of the emails...
Shall I share...
Capture the magic of the season,
Sit down, relax, and have trust in us.
The price of portability
upon Real Girls Business?
Thou must medicate thyself.
Credit where credit is due, this spam poetry site rocks
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
They're just getting ready to invoke line 4531 of the service agreement (that thing in the 5 line scrollbar you agreed to) which says that if they seize your account and all the money therein you agree to settle your case through binding arbitration via email.
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
Paypal is used for most Ebay transactions, and according to Dick Cheney, Ebay is what's keeping our economy going. I'd say more, but I need to go to the store for canned food, plastic sheeting, and duct tape.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
It probably happened because this ebay seller was selling bootleg dvds and the FBI seized Paypal's servers :)
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
By the way, don't trust PayPal's message that the site might be available at any specific time. They've been giving specific times all day today but for the most part, it's inaccessible through any interface... web front-end, payment processing back-end, instant payment notifications, debit cards don't work, etc.
You can read more about the trials and tribulations of this weekend's major outage from a developer's point of view at the PayPal Developer web forum. There are a lot of unhappy campers there!
A service which houses 50 million people, has billions of dollars flow through it, and is the primary payment service for the largest auction site in the world? Sounds pretty newsworthy to me, people.
Regardless, we accept Paypal payments for our business. Didn't work all weekend...and today I kept getting errors (I think it was 30004) telling me to "retry" or "return to main page". Took a few retries, but I did get stuff done....such as transfering money out for payroll on Friday. Auction and storefront sales were down from lack of a payment service though. Debit card had activity over the weekend, so that worked fine.
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
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.
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.
In the US, New York State and Louisiana have imposed some regulatory requirements on PayPal.
If you lost money with Paypal between 1999 and 2003, there's a class action settlement.
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
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
I think this sort of problem was one of the major issues in the class-action lawsuit that PayPal is in the process of settling now (it was litigated this summer).
I'm not sure if your problems were in the right timeframe, but this probably applies to *someone* reading this.
Check here to see if it applies to you.
This morning I withdrew my $4.81 so I could get a pack of smokes and a cup-o-noodle.
Guess they were depending on me to pay their internet bill!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If you use their money market account option, your money isn't insured... but if you just have a regular PayPal balance, it actually is FDIC insured... in a way. Basically, they keep your money in a pooled account in a real bank, and you get "pass-through" FDIC insurance because of that, up to $100K.
They explain this in detail in a link off the homepage.
It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected.
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.
I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
Interesting. I also forwarded to my mother-in-law, although I did not install it locally...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Read all about it here
The site that scared me enough to take all my money out of paypal and never use it again. They're not a real bank and they're not held up to the same standard as real banks. Just read some of the horror stories in their forums.
--Smutt
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Paypal recently relocated their stuff to Omaha, Nebraska. Why Omaha? Something like 60% of all VISA/MC transactions pass through First Data's bunker at 72nd and Pacific and a good portion of the other 40% goes through First National Bank's facilities downtown.
A fellow who used to work for me spent less than three months at Paypal as a Windows server admin. I forget the exact details but he said they wanted him to complete something like thirty projects a quarter and his impression was that eight projects of the sort they were asking would be a reasonable schedule.
I have heard that Paypal is pretty much a madhouse. Omaha isn't big enough to have a huge pool of IT talent and if they're grinding people into the dirt word will get around quickly. I predict you'll see lots of monster.com job posts for them as they poison their reputation here.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
This is the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act", commonly known as "Check 21". Basically it allows a bank anywhere along the path from where the check is first deposited, to its arrival for payment at your bank, to replace the paper check with a front and back image scan. The law provides that your copy of this substituted check must be treated like an original check for the purpose of things like using it as a receipt to show you paid. For example, if your landlord failed to record the fact that you paid the rent, but deposited your check anyway, the law requires this substitute check image (printed back to you by your bank) be accepted as proof the check was deposited just as the original would be.
Banks are not required to do the image scan of checks, but they are allowed to do so. Banks are required to accept the image scan in place of those checks when the image scan gets done. If PayPal is allowing you to write checks against your account (but they would BE a bank if this happens, I'd think), they would have to update their software by October 28 to comply. More likely, if "Check 21" is an issue here, is that they may be adding some software to allow them to image scan checks made as payment to them. But the more they do like this, the closer they become to being a real bank.
When an image scan is done, the check can be processed much faster because it can now be sent to the account holder bank electronically. This is where the "float" many people depend on can start to disappear. OTOH, your bank may be able to get funds into your account for checks paid to you that you deposit equally faster. There is a possibility that PayPal was doing things that depend on the "float". Many business and people have been doing that for years. Practices will now have to change.
For more information:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars