eBay's online payment service PayPal experienced technical problems on Friday. Users reported they could not pay for eBay purchases and some said the outage caused their PayPal debit cards to be declined when making offline purchases.

When contacted Friday afternoon, eBay spokesperson Chris Donlay said that from 14:45 to 16:30PST on Friday, people were having problems logging in and making payments. He said everything was back to functioning properly and said, "the techs are still doing a root cause analysis of the problem."

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml#2005-03-25163743

eBay also said it made changes to its PayPal Preferred Rewards Program effective Friday:

"All members currently participating in the program, who maintain eligibility, will continue to receive the same 1.5% cashback on all PayPal Debit Card purchases, however all new participants will receive a cashback reward of 1%. Also, under the previous guidelines only qualified eBay sellers designating a preference for PayPal in their eBay listings were eligible for the program, but beginning today eligibility will be expanded to include all merchants who promote PayPal as their preferred online payment method, whether operating on eBay or off."

http://www2.ebay.com:80/aw/marketing.shtml#2005-03-25091315