PayPal users around the world were unable to make purchases for much of yesterday because of an internal network hardware failure.
The outage began at around 10.30am Pacific Standard Time (PST), leaving all PayPal users worldwide unable to make or accept payments. In addition, payments via the firm's application programming interface (API) were intermittently unavailable.
By 12.40pm PST the site was working for most users and full service was restored by around 3.00pm PST.
In a blog, Scott Guilfoyle, SVP, technology, PayPal, says: "We're now working to fully understand how we can prevent such a service interruption from ever happening again. We're also reaching out to merchants to discuss the impact this interruption had on their businesses."
The world's most popular online payments system, PayPal claims around 75 million active users in 190 markets around the world and processes around $2000 a second.
Last year, glitches with the PayPal service left merchants unable to accept some international payments for almost two weeks.