PayPal and Venmo down: US users report facing issues with sending and receiving money
PayPal and Venmo users in the US have reported widespread issues with sending and receiving money via these platforms, as both platforms are experiencing a temporary outage. According to outage tracking site Downdetector, the disruptions began shortly before 9 a.m. ET (6,30 pm IST)(with users reporting difficulties in completing transactions and, in some cases, logging in to their accounts. The simultaneous impact on both services is attributed to PayPal’s ownership of Venmo. Millions of users were affected by the outage. However, the problem has since been resolved. A report by ZDNet claimed that during the outage, PayPal’s service status page indicated issues with both online and retail checkout services. Meanwhile, a separate tab listed Venmo as “Operational,” though users were reportedly experiencing problems with the service.
How the outage affected PayPal and Venmo users
As per the report, PayPal’s status page at that time noted: “We are still observing impact to Retail Checkout, Online Checkout and Braintree in our production Environment. Our Technical teams are actively investigating and working to mitigate the impact as quickly as possible. We will continue to provide updates as the situation progresses.”However, after a few hours, both platforms started working again, the report added. In a statement, a PayPal spokesperson said: “PayPal and Venmo experienced a temporary interruption this morning that has since been resolved.”Venmo and PayPal are widely used payment platforms in the US. PayPal claims to have 434 million active users, while Venmo has over 80 million.Despite the company claiming to fix the issue, some users reported that both the Venmo and PayPal platforms appeared to load normally but failed to complete transactions, the report claimed. One user noted that the Venmo app continuously attempted to process a payment for over 45 minutes without success. Meanwhile, a PayPal transaction initiated through a laptop browser showed a successful transfer on the sender’s end, but the recipient never received a notification or an updated balance. Later on, the user reported that Venmo transactions resumed working as expected. Throughout the outage, account balances remained accessible, and fund transfers to bank accounts were still possible according to the app status.
