Massive Disruption of PayPal Subscription Service

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."

Re:Well....

[whmac33]

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.

This is a symptom of management...

[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. Upper management that tries to increase immediate profits at the expense of costly disruptions of service being more likely / frequent are not being selfless and are in fact hurting long term shareholders (investors). I want to see more corporations (sole proprietorships and LLCs too) emphasizing quality as much as features. Even if it increases the price, consumers should demand services and goods that are not low in price but of higher quality for the price. This disruption of service is going to hurt PayPal in immediate profits (right now), long term profits (fewer businesses relying on their service), and of course the value of the stock on Monday. Upper management needs to think about not just immediate profit but sustainable profit.

Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna is the only artist with any talent! Madonna is like the C programming language.

Interfaces Break With the Weakest Link

[yintercept]

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 outside their control.

Thin margins or not...

[swokm]

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]

Probably getting bit by lack of technical talent

[btarval]

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 would be the end of it, but the H.R. person kicked it up to his manager, who tried to lay on the sugar about how it was such a great place to work.

Yeah right. I guess having a decent live potential candidate on the line has to be a rarity there. I can't think of a time when my initial contact has gotten kicked up to an H.R. manager. Usually the internal recruiter tries really hard to handle it, lest they look bad and/or get reduced credit.

Anyway, so I asked the manager that, if what she said was indeed true, how would she respond to some of the recent complaints on paypalsucks.com? I never heard back from her again.

Top technical talent is hard to find these days in Silicon Valley. Serious outages like this shouldn't happen in the first place. But they will when you have less-than-stellar people involved. What this, and my own experience, tells me is that Paypal is having trouble getting good talent. And their reputation isn't helping any.

I wouldn't be surprised to see further problems down the road.

Re:Probably getting bit by lack of technical talen

[Anonymous Coward]

Well paypalsucks.com aside, I've used Paypal for my website for the last 2 years, and they have treated me with the utmost respect. I've had only 7 disputes out of 4800 transactions in that time (6 of them from 1 person trying to get all his past transactions refunded), and overall there has never been a problem. My dividends are paid immediately and they respond fairly quickly when I need them to.

I used to be on your side of the fence until I manned up and started using them because it was the most widely-used system. Everyone bitched to me before I started using them that their fee's would destroy me, but 2.44% average is hardly anything to care about. I don't use eBay, so I don't get doubly-raped by both.

Believe me, 2% to 3% fees and 5% interest on liquid money is not bad. They have had their lag issues, but I've had a very positive experience with them. And no, I have never worked for them.