eBay posted an announcement to users on Friday informing them of a glitch that affected the ability for buyers to pay for items with PayPal. The problem affected transactions going through eBay third-party Checkout. One irate seller who wrote to AuctionBytes estimated the problem prevented payments from going through for approximately 8-10 hours. While she said she was "thousands of dollars behind" where she should be, her biggest complaint was due to the error messages displayed by the eBay system to buyers.

"We spent many man hours answering angry emails from buyers who assumed that we were incompetent, had not set up our paypal account correctly, had a "crappy" checkout system, etc. etc. etc. At no time did Paypal ever inform buyers that it was Paypal's problem."

eBay announced at 5 pm Eastern time that the problem had been resolved.

eBay recently announced it would only provide buyer protection to PayPal-funded transactions in an effort to push buyers to use its online payment service.

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200701121406391.html