PayPal global outage: Technical issue resolved

Payments firm PayPal (PYPL.O) said on Thursday it had resolved an issue that led to a global outage affecting thousands of users for nearly two hours.

The company experienced a system issue that affected multiple products including account withdrawals, peer-to-peer payment service Venmo, online checkout and crypto.

PayPal said the issue, which started at 10:53 GMT, had been resolved as of 12:59 GMT.

Exchanges Coinbase (COIN.O) and Kraken had also posted about outages with PayPal transactions and deposit delays, respectively, on their websites.

The outage occurred on a day bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, has surged to levels to over $98,000 and pulled other crypto stocks along with it.

PayPal allows its clients to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrency.

Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted reports, had said there were nearly 9,000 reports of problems with PayPal transactions as of 12:26 GMT.

In a post on its service status page, PayPal assured customers that the issue had been swiftly resolved.

Despite the prompt resolution, the brief outage led to significant customer frustration, with many users reporting difficulties logging into their accounts and making payments.

Customers took to social media, especially X (formerly Twitter), to share their frustrations. Many users posted screenshots of error messages, including one that read, “Please check your entries and try again,” when attempting to log in.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown into a major global financial institution. The company recently reported in October that its total number of active accounts had reached 432 million as of September 30.