PayPal fixes outage that affected thousands worldwide

(Reuters) – Payments company PayPal said on Thursday it had fixed a problem that led to a global outage that affected thousands of users for nearly two hours.

The company experienced a system problem that affected several products, including account withdrawals, peer-to-peer payment service Venmo, online checkout and crypto.

PayPal said the problem, which started at 1053 GMT, had been resolved from 1259 GMT.

Exchanges Coinbase and Kraken had also written about outages with PayPal transactions and deposit delays respectively on their websites.

The outage came on a day bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has surged to levels above $98,000, dragging other crypto stocks with it.

PayPal allows its customers to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrency.

Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted reports, had said there were nearly 9,000 reports of problems with PayPal transactions as of 8 p.m. 1226 GMT.

(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil and Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)