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Massive Disruption of PayPal Subscription Service
hausmasta writes "Since August 30, there are massive problems with PayPal subscriptions. The automatic renewal of subscriptions stopped that day, causing headaches for lots of web site owners that rely on this kind of revenue. The problem is global, as this thread in the PayPal Developer Community shows. PayPal is aware of the problem but hasn't indicated any progress yet; some posters are wondering whether they have stopped working on it over the long (US) holiday weekend."
Everyone needs a day off, and those who died in military service need to be honored, but if Paypal wants to posture itself as an international company, things need to keep working... even when the USA isn't.
(Posted by an American)
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
https://www.paypaldeveloper.com/blog/article?blog. id=mts_updates&message.id=128
Paypal wants to notify merchants that subscriptions are experiencing some delays and that will be back to normal around September 5, 2007 (Wednesday) or September 6, 2007 (Thursday). Please be assured that no subscriptions will be missed, just that the payout will be delayed.
We apologize for any impact caused by this incident.
Sincerely,
PayPal Merchant Technical Support Team
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This is just more proof that servers know when it is a holiday. They just sit around all year long smile when you walk by them. Their cute little blue LED's blink at you with affection. But leave for a three day weekend and BAM!!! They stab you in the back!
Make no mistake my fine Slashdot friends. Servers are evil little bastards. They know. Oh yes. They know.
...attitude towards IT. Many corporations like Ebay (IMac, too) consider IT to be an expense and not a source of revenue. Consequently, IT gets underfunded. This results in lower quality of workforce and less time spent on debugging augmentations of their infrastructure. The fact that it is taking this long to find the problem shows that IT is underfunded. Corporations need to put as much emphasis on the departments that maintain the quality of service / good as departments that bring immediate revenue. Upper management that tries to increase immediate profits at the expense of costly disruptions of service being more likely / frequent are not being selfless and are in fact hurting long term shareholders (investors). I want to see more corporations (sole proprietorships and LLCs too) emphasizing quality as much as features. Even if it increases the price, consumers should demand services and goods that are not low in price but of higher quality for the price. This disruption of service is going to hurt PayPal in immediate profits (right now), long term profits (fewer businesses relying on their service), and of course the value of the stock on Monday. Upper management needs to think about not just immediate profit but sustainable profit.
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna is the only artist with any talent! Madonna is like the C programming language.
may be that PP has recently upgraded/changed not only their outer web site appearance but also the backend to ?? degree.
Guess this comes with the territory of fast growth, IT and possibly employee fluctuation with global development spread (India, China...).
oh dear lord. Where is the "yes" tag?
That's why my million dollar donation to Slashdot keeps bouncing. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is it just me or is it the end of the world on the forum thread linked in the article. I know small businesses run on slim margins, but when the very first posts are "OMG, payments are over 12 hours behind! It's the end!", I have to think that maybe it's time to build in some robustness into your business model. More likely the people in that thread are being a little melodramatic, as people seem to be wont to do when Paypal is involved. Even this thread on Slashdot seems to just be a way to try to increase pressure on Paypal (which I can agree with to a point).
I read the internet for the articles.
The problems may involve interfaces with the American Banking System. Organizations that deal with large quantities of money are usually not keen on making major changes after hours. When you have a large number of third parties involved in an interface (like you would for money transfers), the timeframe for repairs could well be dictated by third parties.
I would not rush to blame any company for having a hard time responding to an outage on a national holiday, as they may dependent on infrastructure outside their control.
I knocked on genuine 100% cedar wood* the entire time I typed that message. My servers know too, you know.
* And yes, your mom helped. Just figured I'd add that to keep out any obvious your mom jokes that may or may not come my way after typing such an obvious attack vector.
My bank (credit union, actually) is doing a major system upgrade over the long weekend. Maybe something like that is causing PP problems?
One week can be a long time to wait for payment for small business.
i cane_Katrina-PayPal_conflict
I think there definitely needs to be more serious competition in this area, just to provide a little healthier competition.
I'm sure we all remember other problems with PayPal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful#Hurr
How anyone could work at paypal knowing how they deliberately screw over people, without any concern is beyond me.
I know Paypal is having trouble recruiting good people. About a year ago, they picked up my C.V. and tried to get me to apply for a job. I wrote back saying I'd never work at a place with such an awful reputation. Normally that would be the end of it, but the H.R. person kicked it up to his manager, who tried to lay on the sugar about how it was such a great place to work.
Yeah right. I guess having a decent live potential candidate on the line has to be a rarity there. I can't think of a time when my initial contact has gotten kicked up to an H.R. manager. Usually the internal recruiter tries really hard to handle it, lest they look bad and/or get reduced credit.
Anyway, so I asked the manager that, if what she said was indeed true, how would she respond to some of the recent complaints on paypalsucks.com? I never heard back from her again.
Top technical talent is hard to find these days in Silicon Valley. Serious outages like this shouldn't happen in the first place. But they will when you have less-than-stellar people involved. What this, and my own experience, tells me is that Paypal is having trouble getting good talent. And their reputation isn't helping any.
I wouldn't be surprised to see further problems down the road.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Hello Captain.
Sorry to disagree with you, but I used to work at Paypal. It was great, and instead of a check, they sent my earnings directly through Paypal immediately (they only took off 2.9% as well, what a bargain!)
As you can tell, you are wrong about Paypal. They taught me about Fiscal responsibility and with that, I was able to save over 300K in cash. They doubly reinforced that lesson afterward, after I left, by freezing my account.
It turned out to be my pals back at the office! What pranksters! Though, I still wish I had my cash back. It's been over a year and I am beginning to have my doubts.
You don't need to give them permission to withdraw anything, you can manually transfer money to them.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
For subscriptions Google Checkout might be an option now, but for a lot of purposes (especially eBay) there is no other option than to use PayPal. Amazon, perhaps? Not for eBay though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well paypalsucks.com aside, I've used Paypal for my website for the last 2 years, and they have treated me with the utmost respect. I've had only 7 disputes out of 4800 transactions in that time (6 of them from 1 person trying to get all his past transactions refunded), and overall there has never been a problem. My dividends are paid immediately and they respond fairly quickly when I need them to.
I used to be on your side of the fence until I manned up and started using them because it was the most widely-used system. Everyone bitched to me before I started using them that their fee's would destroy me, but 2.44% average is hardly anything to care about. I don't use eBay, so I don't get doubly-raped by both.
Believe me, 2% to 3% fees and 5% interest on liquid money is not bad. They have had their lag issues, but I've had a very positive experience with them. And no, I have never worked for them.
Dear Paypal User A solution has been found to the problem of subscription service. Unfortunately, we will have to renew your account. Please enter your login and password at the following website: http://67.125.40.22./ Sincerely yours, The Paypal Subscription Team paypal452123@yahoo.com
My paypal account was hacked on that day and there were fraudulent charges placed.
any connection?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Just another reason why we always urge our ecommerce customers to stay away from using PayPal. Not that we need another reason.
Um, it's Labor Day were celebrating, not Memorial Day. Although I'm sure our soldiers in the middle east will also be laboring, while most of us (other than retail and restaurant workers) will be resting.
You know, it's usually better to err on the side of cynical when dealing with companies like this, and PayPal does have some questionable incidents in its past.
But seriously -- you think they'd intentionally break a part of the system for a weekend, just to collect a bit of interest? Think about how many clients they're losing entirely and potential clients they're scaring off because of the downtime (and there are more and more viable options to PayPal popping up now, not least among them Google Checkout) and play with the math yourself.
If that was their goal, they could just as easily delay ALL subscription payouts by an extra hour, for a few months... probably no one would even know, and the payoff would be much higher.
See above. Sad, too, as it would really help a project I am working on.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Hey! There's another e-mail. And another.....
Have gnu, will travel.
The paypal shopping cart has a feature to allow you to specify shipping on a per-item basis. This feature was also broken on the same day. The very example on their website
_ cart_overrides_outside
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_pdn
Does not work, and adds the item with the default shipping.
I called to complain and got the typical run around, they send me to the example on that page, I'm like that's the example I'm using, oh can you please hold. What am I going to hold for. Well I need to check your website. What is the address of my website? Long pause. Can you please give your website address. Well why were you about to put me on hold if you didn't know my website name. Sir, if you would please just give me your website address then I can assist you further. Yeah right, you suck. Sir if you are going to use that type of language I am going to have to put you on... discontinue the call. Wait did you just almost say that you were going to put me hold if I used abusive language? Is that your company policy.
obligatory sucks link
http://www.paypalsucks.com/
paypalsucks.
According the owner of my local liquor store, who sells tens of thousands of dollars a day during these holidays ... we're not home resting, we're home drinking. Which just makes your point: he's working and we're not.
... I need another beer.
Which reminds me
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I hope you can live with yourself.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You are right. A few weeks ago I had to choose between PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon's new checkout system for a new subscription-based language learning service I rolled out.
Most of my users are college students and tend to use gmail, so I really wanted to use GC. And they are not charging any TX fees for the rest of 2007, so that made them even more attractive. But they are "optimized" to sell physical goods, not subscriptions, so my users would be forced to receive weird emails about shipping costs in the same way that I received emails with shipping information when I signed my business up for Google Apps, which of course uses GC. That nobody was tasked to address this over the summer amazes me, since these are the same folks who made it possible for us to browse the planet Mars.
Then I looked into Amazon's new checkout service which is now in Beta. This sounded familiar, so I hunted around and found a press release from July 2003 that began: "We are almost ready to kick off the beta for our payment system." After nearly fifty months of beta testing, I'll admit it looks promising. But I am using Ruby 1.8.6, while they are still on Ruby 1.8.5. In this case, it matters, so I need to wait for them to support the version of Ruby that came out nearly six months ago.
So that left PayPal, whose subscription-based payment system is a well-documented first-class offering versus an afterthought bolted on to a system meant for physical goods. It required no hoop-jumping to get integrated. The only absolutely maddening part about the whole development cycle is that even in the sandbox, you are forced to re-authenticate pretty much anytime you pause to look at your code, look away from the web page, or entertain a non-PayPal thought. You have one login for the sandbox itself, one for the sample buyer account, one for the seller account, and one for your own site most likely. You need to have separate browsers open (not tabs) otherwise you're clobbering one login session with another. A simple cycle of "Let's purchase a subscription and see if it tracked properly for the buyer, the seller, and on my own site" sets off a flurry of honey-slow logins and redirects. By the time the last one is done, the first session has probably timed out on you and you need to go at it again.
The upshot, at least from my perspective, is that all three systems weren't ideal for processing my subscriptions, but PayPal was usable.
Yea that is funnny.. I believed I was the only one, but I guess not. I had my account hacked and fraudulent charges also placed. To the tune of 5000+ dollars. Personally I think they are covering up a massive account exposure or server hack.
Ok, enough with the "paypalsucks.com" links.
What are the alternatives? And I mean something that's not USA-only and as easy to setup as PayPal?
I love Pay Pal, best thing to happen to the www since conception. Every connection I have had with them worked out perfect, I have their credit card which is excellent, nothing it seems is too much trouble. All you complainers need to look in the mirror and analyze yourselves.
Can't think of anything clever or funny.
Mine got outright canceled.
I'm betting that the merchant saw the payment not happening, and canceled it from their end, probably fairly automatically. However, it's the second time this particular subscription has been canceled, and it bothers me, especially because there are perks to it lasting longer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!