Back-to-back outages were experienced by PayPal last Friday, resulting in unhappy merchants and red faces at the online payment solution company. It has now emerged that the outage was the result of a network hardware failure, and exacerbated when failover systems didn't spring into action as designed.  

In an official blog post, PayPal CTO Scott Guilfoyle offered his apologies and assured users that the company is working to ensure that such outages--which affected customers worldwide--"won't happen again." He wrote: "We take our commitment seriously to provide our customers a safer and more convenient way to pay and be paid online."

PayPal has more than 87 million active accounts in 24 currencies around the world. It is owned by eBay, who acquired the company for $1.5 billion in 2002. The outage illustrates the challenges inherent to maintaining a cloud-based system in which zero downtime is tolerated. With merchants and customers globally relying on PayPal to be able to complete orders and transfer funds, nobody will argue that perfect uptime is a perfectly reasonable demand.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at DatacenterDynamics

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