Paypal disruptions: Light at the end of the tunnel
Paypal is making progress in resolving cases of insufficient funds in accounts following transactions rejected by banks.
(Image: Nopparat Khokthong/Shutterstock.com)
More than a week after German banks temporarily blocked payments from Paypal to protect their customers, progress is being made. Numerous cases are said to have already been processed. Those affected are now receiving notification emails.
(Image:Â heise medien)
Paypal is now sending emails to customers whose cases of insufficient funds in their Paypal account due to rejected payments by the banks have been resolved. "We'd like to give you an important update," the email says, "Following last week's temporary disruption, your Paypal account has been successfully verified and should now show the correct balance. This means that you can use Paypal's products and services again without any restrictions".
Paypal does not send the notification emails to all customers across the board, but actually in the individual, verified cases. This means that the problem should be resolved for customers who receive this notification and their account should be usable again as normal.
Paypal sees only a small proportion of customers affected
When asked by heise online, Paypal replied that only a small proportion of customers were affected, "less than five percent". According to this, Paypal has around 30 million active users in Germany. Nevertheless, the scale is huge: that's up to 1.5 million customers in Germany who had issues with their Paypal account.
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Paypal was also minimally more specific about the cause of the problem. While it was initially said that a fraud filtering system had failed, the financial company now cites a "human programming error" as the reason, which took effect as part of an update and had the observed consequences.
Until Tuesday, however, customers were still receiving emails informing them that their Paypal account had a shortfall. The associated transactions, which the banks had rejected, also took place in these cases between August 25 and 27 of this year. However, after logging into the account, Paypal has indicated that customers do not need to take action and that the company will review the cases and correct them if necessary.
(dmk)
