I was watching some api calls to PayPal fail, fail, fail today around noon and decided to go have a squiz at a couple of PayPal staffer blogs that I follow to see if anyone was talking about what was going on. So apparently they were down hard for about 40 minutes and horribly spotty for an hour or so more. In fact after about an hour and a half I was still getting email notifications of slowness in the api system which no doubt is due to queued out of process engines trying desperately to get out of the hole.
Well, I have been in their place, last October we went down for the best part of an afternoon and it was a savage thing with hapless engineers and crazy PHB’s rushing around so I do have some sympathy. And when you think about how much GMV they process a second ($2K) this means that around $7M in sales were just dropped on the floor. Ha!
UPDATE: Ouch, still getting failure notices from the API’s at 19:00 EST.
Geof Birchall
