PayPal's Black Monday

Evan Schuman writes about yesterday' "worldwide" PayPal outage in StorefrontBacktalk. 

PayPal Outage Monday Points Out Centralized Processing Weakness
Written by Evan Schuman
August 4th, 2009

Forsomewhere between one and five hours on Monday (Aug. 3), e-tailexecutives get a harsh reminder from EBay how they are all potentiallyone coding error away from millions in lost revenue.

EBay’s PayPal group went dark worldwide for all users for an hour Monday, starting at about 1:30 PM (New York time). Many users were unable to make purchases for a much longer period, until the final users were restored by about 6:30 PM.

The Wall Street Journal quoted EBay spokesperson Anuj Nayar as saying that the cause of the outage was an “internal network hardware issue” and that EBay was “looking into how to address our affected merchants.”...