PayPal billing seems to be down

[sgt_bilko]

When I try to make a purchase from my site or others I know using PayPal I am seeing an error message and it has been like this for quite a while now. I hope they get it fixed quickly because this is hurting sales and I've already had a couple emails asking what is wrong.



You can see a screenshot of the error here http://www.sunnymede.net/screenshots/343.jpg

[sgt_bilko]

This is crazy. I don't think billing has ever been down for an extended period like this.

[sgt_bilko]

It's still down on every site I check. This looks like it has been ongoing for about 12 hours now. I think their offices open in about half an hour here in the UK, so I shall call them to try and see what is going on.

[E-junkie_Guru]

That appears to be the same error discussed in this other thread:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/4708



Googling for the URL that was "not found" in that error, apparently it has something to do with your already being logged into a PayPal account (maybe just merchant or developer accounts?) when you try to test a checkout, so logging out of your PayPal accounts, or better yet clearing your browser cookies, should solve the problem.



If you could provide more details about exactly when in the checkout process this error appears, and whether you're using PayPal Standard or PayPal Pro, we could post that to PayPal's X.com developer forum to confirm whether the "already logged in" explanation is accurate and perhaps get further details.

[sgt_bilko]

It was all very strange with what appeared to be sporadic service for a couple minutes every now and then but generally not working. It was like that for a good 12+ hours and only seemed to stabilise in the early afternoon over here. At one point this morning I was logged in at PayPal and tried to contact them by email from the support section of my account at their site and received the same error message.



This wasn't just happening with my sales page but any and all PayPal sellers I tried, whether or not they were using the e-junkie shopping cart. I deliberately tested other options just to rule out the possibility that there was some glitch at this end.



All of this occurred on my site at least with PayPal standard after an item was added to the cart and I pressed the link to pay by PayPal. In all cases it happened after adding an item to a cart and pressing the button to pay by PayPal or via credit card when that option existed in the pro payment accounts I tested.



Earlier on I contacted PayPal technical support who had me ping their server to confirm the right IP response. They block ICMP but they wanted to see that the correct IP registered. They say that nobody else reported it but if it happens again within the next 48 hours they would like to know the checkout pages where it occurred prior to seeing the error. When I tested everything last night I either saw the error you see in that screenshot or a page 500 error asking me to email the webmaster@paypal.com.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Have you tried testing with a different browser? If the error only comes up in the same browser you've used to log into PayPal lately and not in a browser you rarely use (such as IE for most of us :^), that suggests a garbled PayPal login cookie in your "usual" browser may be causing the problem. Try clearing cookies in that browser, or at least cookies pertaining to 'paypal' or 'x.com' if you don't want to delete them all, and see if that resolves the issue for you.

[sgt_bilko]

For the last 18 hours or so there have been no further problems and it appears to have stabilised. At the time I probably just used the one browser i.e. Safari for Mac. Given that it all looked fine periodically I assumed the browser was OK.



I am certain though that there must have been times in the past when I went through the purchase procedure either on my own site or elsewhere while logged in at PayPal, because I occasionally check my balance just before making a purchase. I shall delete those cookies though as you suggest.