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After nearly five days of sporadic outages, PayPals online payment service appeared to be back to normal on Wednesday.
PayPal officials said that aside from occasional delays for a small percentage of users, the service was working properly. Web-performance monitoring companies also reported that the PayPal Web site had returned to normal uptime.
“In general, people are able to transact as normal using PayPal,” PayPal spokeswoman Sara Bettencourt said in an e-mail. “Some people may experience slight delays as we work through the backlog, but were working as quickly as we can to fix that.”
PayPal started experiencing problems with its service on Friday following a monthly software update. Officials at the San Jose, Calif., company, owned by eBay Inc., blamed a software glitch for intermittent outages that cut across account access as well as payment, shipping and other services.
PayPal is the major form of payment for eBays auctions, and its problems have hampered the completion of sales on eBay as well as on shopping sites across the Internet. PayPal has about 50 million user accounts.
During part of Tuesday, its Web site was largely unavailable. AlertSite.com Inc., for example, found access to the site dipping to 20 percent availability.
By 10 p.m. Tuesday, though, the site returned to 100 percent availability, and it was remaining there throughout Wednesday, said Ken Godskind, vice president of marketing at Boca Raton, Fla.-based AlertSite.com.
PayPal was planning to issue further updates on its sites and to its members about the restoration of full access.
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