PayPal service restored, company announces

Most members of the online payment service Paypal should be able to log on to the Web site after five days of intermittent service outages and furious repair efforts, the company said.

PayPal made “good progress” in restoring service by the peak evening usage hours, the eBay Inc.-owned company announced late Tuesday.

"Most members are now able to log in to the PayPal site to access account information, use shipping functions, use PayPal debit cards, and pay for items online with no difficulty," the company wrote in a statement on its Web site.

PayPal suffered outages for about four days, beginning last weekend. Company officials said the problems were "intermittent," but many consumers complained they weren't been able to log on to their accounts for days. Some said their money was completely frozen by the glitch, and they also could not use debit cards tied to their PayPal balances.

Pires said the problems began Friday, after PayPal added some "code enhancements" to its site.

'I am losing sales and money'
Some users complained to MSNBC.com that they were completely cut off from their eBay business.

"Since my customers can't place an order at all, I am losing sales and money," said user Winsor White. "The term intermittent, as it is being used by PayPal, is highly misleading because it implies that the system has been more up than it has been down."

Auction watchdog Rosalinda Baldwin, who runs The Auction Guild, said she thought the problems were connected to a recent design update for PayPal, but Pires said the outage wasn't related to a redesign.

"We saw a small issue on Friday," after adding some new programming code to the site Thursday evening, Pires said.  "We believed we solved it. But there were intermittent problems on Sunday, and then (Monday)."

PayPal is an important cog in eBay.com. The company claims it has more than 50 million account members and is available to users in 45 countries around the world. Last year, the firm handled $12 billion in transactions.

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