PayPal Upgrade Causes Major Outage, Affects Debit-Card Users: Oct 8, 2004

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  Length of outage: At least 4 days
  
  
• Number of people affected: Unknown, but clearly many hundreds of thousands.

PayPal has become such a major part of our lives for online commerce that we often think of it as something that is just "always there to use" like ATMs. But, of course, it runs on a complex network of servers and other equipment, and with those come upgrades.
Read the original article HERE.
Here's the official word from PayPal (I find it interesting that companies in this situation invariably send out a female staffer to read the official statement to the press. Perhaps they reason that it puts a sweeter face on their weasel carefully-chosen words?) :

PayPal spokesperson Amanda Pires said in addition to the new home page, PayPal "added some features on the backend" on Friday that were the cause of the problem. Pires said, "Everyone is working fast and furiously to get it all fixed." The problems are intermittent, she said, but declined to describe their nature or reveal the features that were added on Friday.

Paypal is owned by eBay, and they now have little in the way of competition to keep them on their toes. As something of an "insider" in one of my jobs, I witnessed some PayPal outages and service degradations that were never publicly acknowledged, so I will not cover them here.