Having your service go down on your customers is certainly not a great way to close out the year. But PayPal developers are reporting thatsubscriptions are down, and have been for a couple of days. This is the second time this year that PayPal has experienced an issue with processing of subscription payments. In September, TechCrunch reported on an outage at PayPal that lasted a few days.
A message posted on the PayPal developer discussion boards by forum moderator “Frank I.” assured developers that the company was looking into the problem. “We are currently investigating the issue. We have gotten the resources necessary to clear this issue,” he wrote. He did not give a time table for when the problem would be solved.
According to David Ciccarelli, the CEO of Voices.com, who alerted us to the outage, the timing could not be worse. “This seriously effects our calendar year-end numbers as I’m sure it does many other businesses that utilize PayPal for managing website subscription payments,” he told us.
A serious outage also afflicted the company in October 2004.
One thing all of these outages have so far had in common: they haven’t done too much to hurt PayPal’s business or let competitors gain some market share. Even now that seems unlikely. PayPal’s two biggest competitors are Google, whose Checkout service doesn’t support recurring subscriptions and Amazon, whose Flexible Payment Service does offer subscription functionality but is in limited beta and not available to everyone. Other than PayPal, the only other option for most sellers is going with an often costly full merchant account.
