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Massive Disruption of PayPal Subscription Service

Posted by kdawson on Sat Sep 01, 2007 10:22 PM
from the just-fix-it-guys dept.
Bug The Almighty Buck The Internet
hausmasta writes "Since August 30, there are massive problems with PayPal subscriptions. The automatic renewal of subscriptions stopped that day, causing headaches for lots of web site owners that rely on this kind of revenue. The problem is global, as this thread in the PayPal Developer Community shows. PayPal is aware of the problem but hasn't indicated any progress yet; some posters are wondering whether they have stopped working on it over the long (US) holiday weekend."
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Submission: Massive Disruption Of PayPal Subscription Service by hausmasta (726127)
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  • Well.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JimXugle (921609) <[moc.elgux] [ta] [miJ]> on Saturday September 01 2007, @10:33PM (#20437799)
    Everyone needs a day off, and those who died in military service need to be honored, but if Paypal wants to posture itself as an international company, things need to keep working... even when the USA isn't.

    (Posted by an American)

    • Re:Well.... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by whmac33 (524094) <whmac33 AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday September 01 2007, @10:38PM (#20437829)
      That would make sense for say Veteran's Day. But for Labor Day we honor ourselves, the workers. In any event, when a 24/7 company is down, you bet they're working on it. It doesn't just cost their clients money, it costs PayPal money.
    • I agree, especially since they are online. Anyways, I noticed the subscription problem today as well, hopefully everything will be back to normal soon.

    • This is a symptom of management... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...attitude towards IT. Many corporations like Ebay (IMac, too) consider IT to be an expense and not a source of revenue. Consequently, IT gets underfunded. This results in lower quality of workforce and less time spent on debugging augmentations of their infrastructure. The fact that it is taking this long to find the problem shows that IT is underfunded. Corporations need to put as much emphasis on the departments that maintain the quality of service / good as departments that bring immediate revenue. Upp
    • It couldn't have happened to a 'nicer' company. Skype also had a week of serious downtime in the last month (some rumoured it was a spyware installation from the US Government).

      • Re:Well.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by vtcodger (957785) on Sunday September 02 2007, @07:09AM (#20439867)
        ***It couldn't have happened to a 'nicer' company.***

        I agree 113.763%. PayPal gives me the creeps. How any sane person can be comfortable dealing with an unregulated bank eludes me. Personally, I simply won't deal with PayPal unless and until they submit themselves to effective external regulation.

        That said, It seems to me like this particular problem is something that could affect any on-line 'bank' -- even a reputable one. It's sort of analagous to having your brick and motar bank shut down by flood, fire, earthquake, riots, power failure.

        • That said, It seems to me like this particular problem is something that could affect any on-line 'bank' -- even a reputable one. It's sort of analagous to having your brick and motar bank shut down by flood, fire, earthquake, riots, power failure.

          I wonder why you undermine your own argument with these last two sentences.
          As a matter of fact, the regulations for brick and mortar banks involve disaster resilience (normally through redundancy over at least two independent datacenters)
          and multiple levels of ins

        • In case you missed it, Wells Fargo was unable to process check card transactions on business accounts for over 48 hours a few weeks ago. Nobody there knew what was going on, and it cost a lot of small companies a LOT of money.
    • The problems may involve interfaces with the American Banking System. Organizations that deal with large quantities of money are usually not keen on making major changes after hours. When you have a large number of third parties involved in an interface (like you would for money transfers), the timeframe for repairs could well be dictated by third parties.

      I would not rush to blame any company for having a hard time responding to an outage on a national holiday, as they may dependent on infrastructure outs

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You've clearly never worked in the banking industry. *Every* major change is done after hours. Anything and everything is done to avoid making any kind of risky change during regular banking hours. Now if the system is unavailable during banking hours...that's another story...
        • I've worked in several industries where the changes were made after hours, but the decisions were made during working hours. Of course, when something goes wrong with a decision, the system would be broken for a 24 hour period.
        • Wells Fargo just had an outage lasting over 48 hours that impacted a huge number of customers.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pallmall1 (882819)

        This US citizen is very very happy to be in Canada and working on living there the rest of my life.
        Well, this US citizen is very happy you're in Canada, too, and sincerely hopes you stay there.

        • This US citizen is very very happy to be in Canada and working on living there the rest of my life.


          Well, this US citizen is very happy you're in Canada, too, and sincerely hopes you stay there.
          Now if we could just get all the religious people to go where they are supposed to go... this would be a pretty nice place!

          ;-)

        •   That's a reply guaranteed to drive people to moving to Canada, methinks ;)

          SB

  • No problem, they'll have it fixed this week (Score:5, Informative)

    by stox (131684) on Saturday September 01 2007, @10:41PM (#20437853) Homepage
    https://www.paypaldeveloper.com/blog/article?blog. id=mts_updates&message.id=128 [paypaldeveloper.com]

    Paypal wants to notify merchants that subscriptions are experiencing some delays and that will be back to normal around September 5, 2007 (Wednesday) or September 6, 2007 (Thursday). Please be assured that no subscriptions will be missed, just that the payout will be delayed.

    We apologize for any impact caused by this incident.

    Sincerely,
    PayPal Merchant Technical Support Team
    • Mine got outright canceled.

      I'm betting that the merchant saw the payment not happening, and canceled it from their end, probably fairly automatically. However, it's the second time this particular subscription has been canceled, and it bothers me, especially because there are perks to it lasting longer.
      • You know, it's usually better to err on the side of cynical when dealing with companies like this, and PayPal does have some questionable incidents in its past.

        But seriously -- you think they'd intentionally break a part of the system for a weekend, just to collect a bit of interest? Think about how many clients they're losing entirely and potential clients they're scaring off because of the downtime (and there are more and more viable options to PayPal popping up now, not least among them Google Checkout)
      • ***Yea so they can collect 4-5 more days worth of interest on YOUR money. Paypal is milking the users much the same way a bank will. Hmmm wonder why they're not required to obey the same rules as a bank does?***

        Shutting down Accounts Payable is the sort of thing that companies that are in serious financial difficulties sometimes do in their final days as they try to hold their house of cards together. I have trouble believing that PayPal could be in that sort of diffuculty. But these ARE troubled times

  • Take it from somebody who has done IT (Score:5, Funny)

    by coryking (104614) on Saturday September 01 2007, @10:43PM (#20437865) Homepage Journal
    This is just more proof that servers know when it is a holiday. They just sit around all year long smile when you walk by them. Their cute little blue LED's blink at you with affection. But leave for a three day weekend and BAM!!! They stab you in the back!

    Make no mistake my fine Slashdot friends. Servers are evil little bastards. They know. Oh yes. They know.

    • This is just more proof that servers know when it is a holiday. They just sit around all year long smile when you walk by them. Their cute little blue LED's blink at you with affection. But leave for a three day weekend and BAM!!! They stab you in the back!

      Make no mistake my fine Slashdot friends. Servers are evil little bastards. They know. Oh yes. They know.

      That's why I set the date on my server's so they think it's Saturday when it's really Tuesday. And, I also set the time so it's 12 hours out,

      • Re:NO! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by coryking (104614) on Sunday September 02 2007, @12:17AM (#20438251) Homepage Journal
        I knocked on genuine 100% cedar wood* the entire time I typed that message. My servers know too, you know.

        * And yes, your mom helped. Just figured I'd add that to keep out any obvious your mom jokes that may or may not come my way after typing such an obvious attack vector.
  • may be that PP has recently upgraded/changed not only their outer web site appearance but also the backend to ?? degree.

    Guess this comes with the territory of fast growth, IT and possibly employee fluctuation with global development spread (India, China...).

  • That's why my million dollar donation to Slashdot keeps bouncing. ;-)

  • Not good for Paypal, but geez (Score:5, Informative)

    by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Saturday September 01 2007, @11:20PM (#20438029) Homepage Journal
    Is it just me or is it the end of the world on the forum thread linked in the article. I know small businesses run on slim margins, but when the very first posts are "OMG, payments are over 12 hours behind! It's the end!", I have to think that maybe it's time to build in some robustness into your business model. More likely the people in that thread are being a little melodramatic, as people seem to be wont to do when Paypal is involved. Even this thread on Slashdot seems to just be a way to try to increase pressure on Paypal (which I can agree with to a point).

    • Re:Not good for Paypal, but geez (Score:5, Funny)

      by coryking (104614) on Saturday September 01 2007, @11:27PM (#20438057) Homepage Journal
      If you ever want to see amusing, look at the idiots who post on the Second Life blog whenever their stuff goes down [secondlife.com]. You think "OMG My payments are 12 hours behind" is bad, try "OMG, I make a living selling virtual dildos and I cannot sell my product. It is the end!!!"
    • Paypal idiocy has cost me in the past. They decided to suspend my account until I gave emailed them photo id etc. They offered no explanation other than 'suspicious activity'. Fair enough if they are trying to protect my account, but they also suspended automatic debits which have been paid many times in the past. This suspension caused a bill to not be paid, which caused my web site to be suspended, which cause me to lose quite a bit - more than I even had in the account. Thanks paypal.
    • You miss one fundamental point...

      Small businesses most often are successful based on quality of service. It is therefore perfectly understandable that small business owners should be concerned when a service provider completely fails in their core business task causing them inconvenience and confusion.

      Paypal is clearly not interested in quality of service -- they never have been -- although they are much worse since the eBay purchase. It's milk the cash cow all the way. If they were concerned with ser
      • several reasons

        1: network effects, afiact once you move beyond the most basic account level it costs to move money in and out of paypal and even if it doesn't cost money it does cost time (banking systems are slow) so if you get payed using paypal you will want to pay others using paypal.
        2: EBAY, the worlds largest online auction site and they strongly encourage use of paypal
        3: international transactions, for small transactions paypals fees are way lower than my banks fees for using my card with an american
        • You are right. A few weeks ago I had to choose between PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon's new checkout system for a new subscription-based language learning service I rolled out.

          Most of my users are college students and tend to use gmail, so I really wanted to use GC. And they are not charging any TX fees for the rest of 2007, so that made them even more attractive. But they are "optimized" to sell physical goods, not subscriptions, so my users would be forced to receive weird emails about shipping costs
      • People don't put grace periods in their systems? I can understand being upset about not getting the info from Paypal, but the best solution would seem to be to suspend account terminations until after the Paypal issue is sorted out. This shouldn't cause their business to collapse.
      • i bought a virtual dildo but it turned out to be counterfeit....
      • Did you know that Virginia Tech keeps the email accounts of their students open until they stop using them? It's a very convenient feature that they don't advertise.

  • Thin margins or not... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swokm (1140623) on Sunday September 02 2007, @12:34AM (#20438309)
    One week can be a long time to wait for payment for small business.

    I think there definitely needs to be more serious competition in this area, just to provide a little healthier competition.

    I'm sure we all remember other problems with PayPal:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Awful#Hurri cane_Katrina-PayPal_conflict [wikipedia.org]
    • Amazon's FPS [amazon.com] can do recurring subscriptions (with multi-use tokens) as well - it's a bit more complex, of course, they give you the low-level stuff and leave it to you to build an application on top of it. The advantage here is you're the one triggering the billing each month - you don't have to rely on them to re-submit it for you. Of course, this is also a disadvantage, as your app needs to keep track of such things, and handle triggering the transaction at the proper times.
  • For subscriptions Google Checkout might be an option now, but for a lot of purposes (especially eBay) there is no other option than to use PayPal. Amazon, perhaps? Not for eBay though.
  • Dear Paypal User A solution has been found to the problem of subscription service. Unfortunately, we will have to renew your account. Please enter your login and password at the following website: http://67.125.40.22./ [125.40.22] Sincerely yours, The Paypal Subscription Team paypal452123@yahoo.com
  • My paypal account was hacked on that day and there were fraudulent charges placed.

    any connection?
  • I just received e-mail from PayPal informing me of the problem and requesting that I follow the attached link and verify my account information.


    Hey! There's another e-mail. And another.....

  • Ok, enough with the "paypalsucks.com" links.

    What are the alternatives? And I mean something that's not USA-only and as easy to setup as PayPal?

    • Good luck with that approach. Personally, if I saw someone with paypal on their Resume, it would be a serious negative. It would tell me that they have no morals.

      How anyone could work at paypal knowing how they deliberately screw over people, without any concern [paypalsucks.com] is beyond me.

      I know Paypal is having trouble recruiting good people. About a year ago, they picked up my C.V. and tried to get me to apply for a job. I wrote back saying I'd never work at a place with such an awful reputation. Normally that woul

      • Hello Captain. [ytmnd.com]

        Sorry to disagree with you, but I used to work at Paypal. It was great, and instead of a check, they sent my earnings directly through Paypal immediately (they only took off 2.9% as well, what a bargain!)

        As you can tell, you are wrong about Paypal. They taught me about Fiscal responsibility and with that, I was able to save over 300K in cash. They doubly reinforced that lesson afterward, after I left, by freezing my account.

        It turned out to be my pals back at the office! What pranksters!

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