Ask HN: Has anyone noticed an increase in payments failure through PayPal
Pretty much what it says on the tin, more and more often Paypal hangs on me, quits, etc...
I'm in the middle of moving some money around and seriously considering just taking out the cash and paying a mate to transport it.
I've also noticed some weird peaks on other bank systems, all in different places: Panama, Switzerland, South Africa, and Japan.
My question is the following: Have you noticed anything? Extra traffic? Longer wait times? More failed anything? How about credit cards? Any failed transactions?
And well, I'm an engineer, I want to know why, actually I want to know if something IS actually happening or if it's just because I'm very active user and therefore more in contact with.
Cheers, keep your rifles oiled.
Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava!
18 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadIt looks fine, dark areas are dark, green areas are green.
Still, my antenitas de vinil are twitching, someone, somewhere fucked up I think, probably not important and probably already fixed, but it was a weird one.
Because I just helped a client set-up their Monero and put funds into it, no problem, zilch, smooth as butter.
So are ETH, BTC, and even fucking DOGE.
For a moment I thought that the Serbians had rushed into fucking Kosovo and were pulling a DDOS, I mean... Not the Serbians obviously, but you know.
So yeah, probably nothing, meeting a mate next week in London however, he's BT so I'll ask him if he's seen anything odd.
I thought I already had Venmo so when I customer asked I said yes. Turns out I had a Zelle account. So I quickly set up Venmo. They did a business and personal account by default. I went through all the steps and Venmo said everything was working and ready.
The customer transferred me the money and boom, my account was frozen for "violating the ToS", no more explanation. They transferred money to an account Venmo said was fine. Transferring money IS their business so I thought it weird that this violated their ToS. Also weird that nothing violated the ToS until they had my money.
There is no phone number to call. Chat doesn't help.
I strongly advise not carrying around lots of cash, especially within the U.S. Legal or not, you'll be an automatic target of Civil Asset Forfeiture from corrupt police. A lot of people use Amazon gift cards. There's also always crypto.
It's a dumb idea to carry loads of cash for many reasons, but this shouldn't dissuade you from using physical cash as a tool for many day-to-day purchases.
While it has some bad properties (can be lost/stolen/damaged, can't be transmitted digitally, government can inflate it at will) it also has some properties that are also very valuable (relatively private, easy to trade and interact with compared to crypto and other forms of money, and can be relied on when the power goes out)
But like I said in my other comment(which already has 2 downvotes, well done bots), it looks like a fluke, and nothing important.