Thousands of customers report short-term outages

Payments app PayPal experienced a brief worldwide outage on Thursday, it confirmed.

It said in a post on its service status page it experienced “a system issue” that affected several PayPal products — including account withdrawal and express checkout.

The company said the technical issue was quickly resolved.

But even a brief outage was enough to cause problems for customers, who reported being unable to log into their accounts or said they were having trouble making payments.

Platform outage monitor Downdetector had received more than seven thousand reports from users per 12:12 GMT.

According to the company’s service status dashboard, the incident began at 10:53 UTC.

It said its cryptocurrency services and peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo, were among its services affected by the outage.

Customers took to social media to post about being unable to access their accounts.

Several users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots of a warning telling them to “please check your records and try again” when they tried to log in.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown to become a major global financial institution.

It told investors in October that its total number of active accounts across its operations had increased to DKK 432 million in the period ending 30 September.