'Fully restored' PayPal still stuttering for UK users

by Steven Mostyn - Nov 2 2010, 14:14

eBay-owned PayPal found itself floundering offline this weekend when a data centre malfunction hauled the online payment service from the Net and left its customers without access for several hours. However, despite claiming the problem was swiftly addressed, PayPal users in the UK are reportedly still suffering the after effects.

According to PayPal, the initial outage happened at just after 8:00 a.m. Pacific Time (PT) on October 29, with the service interruption swiftly blamed on a network hardware failure in one of its data centres. Although the problem was fully fixed by 9:24 a.m. (PT), a second issue reared up at 11:30 a.m. (PT) and promptly yanked the service down until 12:21 p.m. (PT).

“We take our commitment seriously to provide our customers a safer and more convenient way to pay and be paid online,” said chief technical officer Scott Guilfoyle in an official PayPal blog post. “So we understand how frustrating it is to experience any disruption in the benefits PayPal provides.”

“Nothing is more important than our relationship with our customers, and the trust you have in PayPal,” said Guilfoyle. “We are investigating ways to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

For most PayPal users, normal service was indeed resumed from lunchtime on Saturday—but not for those in the UK, who’ve been reporting persistent usage problems running through Monday of this week.

Speaking with PC Pro, Claire Thomas of online clothing emporium Ella Bean said the site remains down “and PayPal isn’t doing anything about it.”

According to Thomas, who notes that other online retailers are also experiencing similar headaches, attempts to use the payment service have resulted in the site spewing error messages or hanging completely.

“When you phone PayPal up, they say that either there are no problems or they give you patronising advice like telling you to clear your cache or clear your cookies,” grumbled Thomas. “It’s not good.”

A spokesperson for PayPal has said the service has no knowledge of any ongoing service outage affecting the UK.

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