PayPal to go offline for 2 hours on 20th April 2012

PayPal are to go off line for about an hour between 4am and 6am GMT on the Friday the 20th of April. This is part of a planned maintenance cycle while PayPal upgrade their servers.

If you’re a buyer or a seller all you need to know is that you won’t be able to log into your PayPal account during this downtime. If you offer PayPal as a payment method on your website or use the PayPal API for an application it’s likely that this will also return either an error message or simply time out.

For America it will be the 9pm to 11pm on the evening of the 19th. However if you’re the other side of the world in the Far East or Australia it’ll be hitting you in the middle of the day which will be more of an inconvenience. The UK have struck lucky with it falling in the early hours of the morning which are generally a slow time for most merchants.

Sadly no matter what time of day or night PayPal schedule major maintenance for, because they’re a worldwide service, some will be impacted more than others. Hopefully for us in the UK by the time we wake up and start to print our our orders everything will be back to normal.