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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.
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.
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.