As you may know, PayPal suffered from downtime yesterday. Overall, the problems lasted approximately 4.5 hours before being fully resolved. Since a significant number of e-commerce sites and online services handle some or all of their transactions through PayPal, how much money did the PayPal outage end up costing its users?
According to eBay (which owns PayPal), about $2,000 in payments flow through PayPal’s systems every second. This means that PayPal processes about $7.2 million in payments every hour for its users.
On its official blog PayPal has stated that the service was completely down, globally, for about one hour. So the outage cost PayPal users at least around $7 million. But PayPal also admits that it took an additional 3.5 hours after that before the service was fully restored, something we also need to take into account.
This means that the outage and following service problems cost Paypal users somewhere between $7 million and $32 million in lost payments.
Exactly where the actual cost landed between those two extremes is hard to tell, but judging by the comments we have seen in blogs and on Twitter, the problems were significant even after the initial one-hour service outage.
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