What's Going On With PayPal? Is eBay Communications Clueless?
Yesterday I logged into PayPal and attempted to "accept" a payment. When I click accept, it goes to a page that has an html title of "page not found" and a link to "try again". I waited 24 hours and then contacted support.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is one data point in a rough late-summer stretch for eBay's operations. Two weeks earlier, analysts had already criticized eBay senior management for going silent during the Skype outage crisis, and as recently as July 2007 PayPal had been reported outperforming Google's payment unit in a segment of the web payments market — meaning its reliability lead was the story.
The new wrinkle: a multi-day failure of PayPal's subscription payment service, down since August 30 per widespread user reports, compounded by 'page not found' errors when accepting payments and a support channel that went unanswered for 24 hours. The story's pickup by TechCrunch ('Multi-Day Paypal Subscription Outage') shows it traveled well beyond one blogger's support ticket, turning an ops incident into a communications problem for eBay.
First-order effects
- Merchants dependent on PayPal's subscription billing have been unable to collect recurring payments since August 30, converting a technical failure directly into lost revenue for sellers, not just inconvenience for buyers.
- Users attempting to accept payments hit dead-end pages and then an unresponsive support queue — the incident is simultaneously a product failure and a customer-service failure.
Second-order effects
- With PayPal reported ahead of Google's payment unit as of July 2007, a visible multi-day outage hands that competitor an argument on reliability at exactly the moment merchants evaluate alternatives.
- Blogger and TechCrunch amplification forces eBay's communications function into the frame — echoing the August 19 criticism of management silence during the Skype outage, the complaint shifts from 'the service is down' to 'nobody at eBay is saying anything.'
Third-order effects
- If outages plus silent support become a pattern, reliability and incident communication become explicit selection criteria in web payments, where trust is the product — a structural risk for a platform whose July standing rested on being the dependable default.
- For eBay broadly, repeated high-profile failures across properties (Skype, now PayPal) invite scrutiny of whether its acquisition-and-operations model can run mission-critical consumer infrastructure.
The trend: Web payments in 2007 are consolidating around trust and uptime as the competitive frontier, where PayPal's lead over rivals like Google's checkout effort is only as durable as its last outage.