PayPal Very Quietly Admits That It’s Aware Of Random Payment Delays

While PayPal posted this notice in one of its support forums, the company has yet to make a more public statement about the delays.

While PayPal posted this notice in one of its support forums, the company has yet to make a more public statement about the delays.

Recently, a growing number of PayPal users have noticed that payments that had historically shown up instantly were now being delayed hours. The company finally acknowledged the problem yesterday, but it’s not being as upfront about the issue as some users would like.

One Consumerist reader tells that she’s been having problems with PayPal delays for a couple of weeks now, with payments sometimes taking several hours to show up in her account.

“These are not e-check payments but ones that normally go through instantly,” she clarifies, adding that “It doesn’t happen with every single payment, but rather randomly.”

She searched online to see if others were complaining, and lo and behold, she found multiple complaints from other PayPal users about similar delays.

Then yesterday morning, PayPal posted this notice in one of its support forums, acknowledging the problem and saying that “Our engineers are aware of an issue right now where payments are not immediately appearing in the account activity for both senders and recipients.”

While it’s comforting to know that their complaints aren’t being ignored, some users want to know why PayPal is burying this info in the forums and has not posted any sort of general notice on PayPal.com. It hasn’t even shared this information via its Facebook or Twitter social channels.

One user responded that they are very dissatisfied with the way that PayPal has handled the situation.

“You’ve known about it most of the day, but didn’t place any warning on the transaction screen,” writes the user, “and when I contacted Paypal Support about a duplicate transaction, they not only gave me conflicting, incorrect information but essentially told me that it was Paypal’s fault, but that they could not help me in any way.”

“I think you guys really need to post something about this on our account pages before we try to send any money until you get the issue fixed,” writes another. “It’ll help prevent anyone from sending money multiple times or confusion about the status of their payments.”

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