It took PayPal a day to realize its upgrade to the site last Thursday had apparently caused a glitch in its Subscription Payments program. Website owners were getting no payments from PayPal for automated subscriptions, and they were without money or answers for 3 days. PayPal posted on its blog on Sunday it had fixed the glitch.

PayPal had deployed enhancements to its live site beginning late on August 29, 2007 and ending early on August 30. While some developers believed PayPal may have actually cancelled subscriptions that were received during the outage, or given the appearance that subscriptions were cancelled, PayPal said no subscriptions were cancelled as a result of the glitch.

Developers reported having a difficult time getting PayPal customer service reps to understand the problem. A post on the PayPal developer boards indicates PayPal did not start investigating the problem until Friday.

One developer blogged about his challenge in conveying the problem to customer service representatives, titling his entry, "PayPal - The Worst Customer Service Experience of My Life" (http://tinyurl.com/yqccbg).

On Sunday afternoon, PayPal posted on its blog that it was still working through the backlog of payments that were affected, and that merchants could expect to receive those payments "within the next 24 hours." PayPal, a subsidiary of eBay, said new subscription signups were not affected by the glitch.

The Tamebay blog points out that eBay sellers who pay their eBay fees automatically from PayPal might be affected (http://www.tamebay.com/2007/09/do-you-pay-your-ebay-fees-via-paypal.html).

http://www.thepaypalblog.com/weblog/2007/09/subscription-is.html