PayPal Goes Down, No Shopping on eBay

Shopping ground to a halt across eBay and any other merchant with a PayPal API beginning at about ten o’clock this morning, Pacific Standard Time. Officials at PayPal issued the following notice this morning on the PayPal developer site:
 

“During the time listed below you may have or currently are experiencing the following:
Buyers may experience error "Sorry - your last action could not be completed" on trying to login to www.paypal.com.

Payments via API are intermittently unavailable.”
 

Three hours later, PayPal reported the beginning of technical recovery:

“[3] Update: This notification is to inform you that we have started recovering. Some intermittent issues remain which we are currently addressing.”
 

No further details on the technical problems are available at the moment. And just about the time when technicians breathe a sigh of relief as PayPal begins processing transactions again, PayPal’s owner eBay may see it’s just the beginning of a much larger problem. With an undeniably significant impact on ecommerce, what if any, is eBay’s financial obligation to merchants?
 

It was only three weeks ago that credit card processing giant Authorize.net went down due to a fire in their Seattle facility. Authorize.net was quick to set up a Twitter account to open immediate communication with merchants. Unfortunately, PayPal is tight lipped on this one. Good customer service could go a long way in smoothing ruffled feathers.