Hardware failure causes PayPal outage

PayPal suffered a worldwide outage last Friday after a network hardware failure in one of its data centres. An initial service outage began at around 8.00am PT and lasted for approximately an hour and a half. A second outage lasting about 50 minutes hit at 11.30am PT.

In a blog, the company's CTO, Scott Guilfoyle, confirmed the cause of the problem was a data centre network hardware failure which was compounded by an inability to switch over to back up systems "as quickly as planned".

"We are investigating ways to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Thanks for your patience today, and for using PayPal. My apologies once again," says Guilfoyle.