PayPal users began reporting Monday morning that they could not access the payment service's Recent Activity feature, and some could not access their account history either. The glitch inconvenienced some sellers who were trying to verify customer payments before fulfilling orders. One seller on eBay's PayPal discussion board expected negative feedback from buyers because "items that have next day shipping that came in over the weekend I have no way to ship." eBay pronounced the problem resolved at 8:46 pm ET Monday evening.

eBay's initial post about the problem stated, "Members are currently experiencing errors with some PayPal related aspects of eBay Checkout, such as using the PayPal payment status link in Checkout and generating shipping labels. We are aware of these issues and working to resolve them as quickly as possible." eBay posted the message at 1:46 pm ET.

PayPal spokesperson Amanda Pires said the problem affected only some users on an intermittent basis. Pires said the cause of the problem was still unknown when AuctionBytes spoke to her 1 - 2 hours before the problem was posted resolved. When asked if it had to do with today's maintenance, Pires said it did not.

One seller posting on the eBay discussion boards wrote, "I had a $5,000 weekend and I can't do squat to get these orders out." Another seller wrote, "I paid PayPal over $600 last month, I and all your other customers deserve better site performance. Compare PayPal against Google Checkout that just announced FREE processing for the next 13 months, PayPal MUST do better!"

However, the Mercury News reported on Monday that Google appears to be having some problems of its own (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/columnists/16213091.htm).

http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000400608

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml