PayPal on a go-slow: here's why

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If you’ve used PayPal at all over the last week or two, you’ll have noticed it’s on a go-slow. There have been all sorts of problems, from eBay fee payments not showing up, to eBay buyer payments being marked at “pending” when they were really cleared. Most strange, in my view, were the messages that “it may take extra time for your latest transactions to appear in your Recent Activity”.

We’ve now heard back from PayPal as to just what’s going on, and it seems they’re a victim of their own success. They told me in an email that “the database memory needed to host this data was starting to have a negative impact on our systems. There was a threat of bugs and crashes looming as we approached capacity, so we had to balance platform stability against good service for our sellers. This current solution isn’t perfect, but it safely allows us to keep up and running while we work on longer term solutions.”

It’s not great, but as they say, it’s better than everything just crashing: those of us who were around for the Great Crash of ’03, when we couldn’t receive payments at all for several days, will vouch for that. Lets hope a better solution can be rolled out soon.

An unrelated problem that many sellers complained about, the disapperence of the link to add tracking details, should have now been fixed. If you still don’t see that link on your transaction details pages, please let PayPal support know.

One Response

  1. My question to PayPal would be why no-one in that huge organisation saw they were getting near capacity and do something about it about 6 months ago?
    Seems ridiculous to me that it’s been allowed to get to this.

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