API error knocks PayPal, Venmo offline around the globe

If you were planning on sending someone money via PayPal, or use it for business, we’ve got bad news: It’s down around the world. 

PayPal confirmed the matter in a post to its status website that indicates the problem stems from an issue with the GraphQL API that a number of the company’s services operate on. According to the outage notice, withdrawals, express checkout, crypto activity, a number of Venmo services and Xoom have all been affected. 

The incident began around 1100 UTC, around 0600 on the east coast of the United States as reflected by a spike of reports on Down Detector of users who were unable to log in. When able to access their accounts, users reported that they were unable to send or receive money, that banking account and card info was missing, and the like. 

PayPal users also took to social media to report the outage, with posts on Twitter about being unable to use the service numerous. 

This vulture has been able to access his account, but has been unable to do much on the app or website without getting an error message or being booted back to the login screen. 

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PayPal noted that merchants are likely seeing an increase in HTTP 500 errors for REST API calls, but little detail was provided as to the cause of the outage. 

While writing, PayPal updated its incident page to indicate the problem had been resolved, and service appears to have returned to normal – at least for your reporter. 

While the matter has been resolved, it’s still not immediately clear what caused the outage with the Braintree GraphQL API, be it a cyber attack or, perhaps, a matter of not having enough people around to watch the stack.

We’ve reached out to PayPal to learn more about the outage, but haven’t heard back as of publication. This story will be updated as we learn more. ®