Thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding while we got things back in check, with our apologies for the extended trouble. Now that we have things stabilized again, here's what we now know about the cause of the outage:

Apparently this was all a result of someone trying to extort money from E-junkie's owner. They'd claimed they devised some obscure hack that could take down our system, which they'd reveal if they were paid a hefty ransom, then launched this attack as a purported "demonstration" of their exploit. However, our DevOps engineers soon found the attack wasn't anything like the obscure hack they'd alluded to, so that was evidently a bluff, and they were hoping we'd just pay the ransom before we discovered their ruse.

Rather, all signs indicated their "demonstration" was nothing other than an ordinary DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack flooding our system with bogus connection attempts, which is rather like flash-mobbing a physical store with rabble-rousing loiterers, so legitimate buyers can't get in to shop. These typically use a "bot net" comprising multitudes of computers scattered worldwide (typically malware-infected PCs) to make every hit come from a different IP address, making it ineffective to block any particular IP. Our DevOps team spent the afternoon and evening manually fending off the bogus traffic as best they could while enabling and testing various automated countermeasures to curb the attack without such manual intervention, in a way that would not also adversely affect our services in other ways, so that involved a bit of trial and error to arrive at an effective solution.

While all that bogus DDoS traffic was slamming our system, some PayPal IPNs (Instant Payment Notifications) may not have reached us. We depend on receiving IPN to know when a buyer's PayPal payment is Completed, so we can then process their order accordingly. Fortunately, PayPal does automatically retry Failed IPNs a few more times, so many of those may have come through by now.

If you're still seeing any Completed payments in PayPal that aren't listed in your E-junkie Transaction Log, that indicates we did not process that order yet, in this case most likely because the IPN for that payment couldn't get through to us. You can check for any such Failed IPNs and have PayPal retry them, at which point we should then be able to process that buyer's order as usual. The troubleshooting steps on this help page starting from Section C, Step 2 will walk you through how to do that: