PayPal falls offline in datacentre failure

Online payment company PayPal was unable to offer services worldwide on Friday for a period of 2.5 hours.

A network hardware failure in one of PayPal's datacentres knocked its services offline from 8:07am, US Pacific Time (4:07pm GMT) on Friday. Full service was resumed by 9:24am, but failed again at 11:30am, with services back up at 12:21pm, PayPal's chief technology officer, Scott Guilfoyle wrote in a blog post. No further information is available on the nature of the hardware failure at this time as a "post-mortem" on the fault is currently being conducted, a PayPal spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Tuesday.

The outage lasted for so long partially because the company was not able to switch to its backup services as quickly as planned, Guilfoyle wrote in the blog post.

"We are investigating ways to ensure that this doesn't happen again," he wrote.

PayPal is a wholly-owned subsidiary of online trading site eBay and its technology is used in a wide variety of web payment transactions. PayPal uses eBay's own datacentres for its hardware infrastructure, according to eBay's senior director of global datacentre strategy, architecture and operations.

However, network hardware aside, PayPal is in the process of upgrading its domain name servers from 20 October to 10 November, which could lead to problems such as "intermittent timeouts and slow response time when resolving [PayPal] domain names", according to PayPal.