PayPal explains and apologizes the worldwide outage in the system

On Monday an online payment services leader PayPal shut down worldwide for about an hour which was caused by "internal" problems with the fast-growing division. The downtime started at 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time and affected all users for about an hour. All customers had regained service as of 3:30 p.m. On the official blog eBay spokesperson Anuj Nayar brought apologies for the outage and explained what happened:

To all PayPal users, please accept my apologies on behalf of everyone at PayPal for the service interruption you experienced today.

We take our commitment seriously to provide our customers a safe, secure and convenient way to pay and be paid online. So we understand how frustrating it is to experience any disruption in the benefits PayPal provides.

Let me update you on what happened, and how we acted as quickly as possible to restore service. At around 10:30 am PT Monday, a network hardware failure resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide. Everyone in our organization focused immediately on identifying the issue and getting PayPal up and running again. We accomplished that in about an hour. By approximately 3 pm PT, full service was restored across our platform.

We’re now working to fully understand how we can prevent such a service interruption from ever happening again. We’re also reaching out to merchants to discuss the impact this interruption had on their businesses.

Nothing is more important than our relationship with our customers, and the trust you have in PayPal. Thanks for your patience today, and for using PayPal.