It is one of the world’s most popular digital payment services.
But PayPal was down for over two hours this morning, leaving thousands unable to access their accounts.
While the company has not yet commented on the cause, Down Detector reports showed outages starting from 11:00 GMT.
A Paypal spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘We experienced a brief technical issue, which has been resolved.’
Of the 6,000 PayPal users reporting issues with the service by midday, almost 90 per cent said they were unable to log into their accounts.
This unexpected issue sparked widespread concern that the site had been hacked as users found themselves unable to access their accounts.
On social media, furious customers have rushed to vent their frustrations over the disruption.
One commenter wrote on X: ‘It seems PayPal are having a complete meltdown as nobody can login or get through via their call centre.’
Users began experiencing issues shortly after 11:00 am GMT as customers began reporting difficulties accessing PayPal’s services.
The number of reports quickly spiked and hit more than 6,000 from around the world just an hour later.
In the UK, the majority of outage reports were centred on London, Manchester and Birmingham but this is believed to have been a more widespread issue.
Likewise, PayPayl users in the US also reported finding the service unusable.
On social media, customers said that they were unable to log in to their PayPal accounts through the mobile app or website.
On X, one commenter wrote: ‘I can’t log in to my PayPal account right now. It keeps showing the message, ‘Please check your entries and try again’.’
In a post on PayPal’s status page, the company reported an ‘on-going’ incident which began at 10:53 GMT this morning.
PayPay said that withdrawals, Express Checkout, cryptocurrency services, and Venmo had all been affected.
The company wrote: ‘We are experiencing a system issue that may be affecting multiple products in our Production environment.
‘Our technical teams are actively working towards resolving the issue.’
The issue now appears to have been resolved with outage reports on Down Detector swiftly falling from their earlier peak.
By 1:14 GMT, there were only 476 reports of issues concerning logging in or making purchases through the service.
However, that was not before the sudden disruption triggered widespread concern among PayPal’s users.
Unable to use the vital service, anxious users took to social media with worries that the site might have been the victim of a cyber attack.
One customer wrote on X: ‘Has PayPal been hacked? No access possible for lots of us…’
‘PayPal is your system down this morning cuz I can’t even login to my account and I’m concerned about being hacked at this point,’ added another.
And, as it emerged that the site had not been hacked, many took to social media to express their relief.
‘I already thought my PayPal is hacked or something but turns out it’s down for everyone,’ added one commenter.
While another added: ‘PayPal outage had me convinced my account had been hacked and now I’m gonna need some time for my adrenaline to settle down.’
Although it is not likely that PayPal has been hacked the company is yet to provide any comment on what has caused the issues.
