Payment servicePayPalwas offline for about an hour this morning causing problems
for consumers that rely on its service to make and receive
payments.
"It is back up now after being down for about an hour and
payments are being processed," said a spokeswoman.
PayPal has millions of customers in the UK who use it to make
secure payments including payments on websites such as eBay. It has
to link into the main payments systems run by the banks.
Small businesses often use it because it is easy to set up and
no formal agreement with a payment processor is required.
Gareth Lodge, analyst at Towergroup, said he is not aware of any
problems before. "Overall, its reliability is very good over the
last ten years."
He said the impact on users depends on where the fault was.
"There are two parts to PayPal. You can make payments from PayPal
to PayPal or getting payments from main banking payments
infrastructure."
PayPal had not yet prepared a statement about the cause of the
problems.