On Thursday, PayPal experienced a brief but widespread outage, temporarily disrupting services for users worldwide, the company confirmed.
In a post on its service status page, PayPal described the incident as “a system issue” that affected multiple products. Key services, including account withdrawals, cryptocurrency operations, express checkout, and its Venmo payment app, were impacted.
The outage began at 10:53 UTC, with over 7,000 user reports flooding the platform outage monitor Downdetector by 12:12 GMT. Customers reported being unable to log into their accounts or complete transactions, causing widespread frustration.
Social media platforms quickly became hubs for affected users to share their experiences. Many shared screenshots of error messages such as “please check your entries and try again” when trying to access their accounts.
PayPal moved swiftly to resolve the issue, and by the time the technical problem was addressed, the disruption had already affected a significant portion of its customer base.
Despite the temporary nature of the outage, it served as a stark reminder of how dependent many users have become on PayPal’s services. With over 432 million active accounts reported as of 30 September, even minor glitches can have global ramifications.
Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown into one of the world’s largest financial platforms. While the company has promised to improve its system reliability, Thursday’s incident highlights the challenges of maintaining seamless operations in the digital age.
The company has since apologised for the inconvenience caused and reassured customers that services are now fully operational.
