Even the largest companies in the world have outages. In case you missed the email from PayPal, they have a few small yet large planned outages this month:

• Saturday June 16, 11:30 PM PDT – 11:40 PM PDT (Sunday June 17, 2:30 AM EDT – 2:40 AM EDT)
• During these 10 minutes, payment processing will likely result in declines/failures
• https://www.x.com/content/jun-16-maintenance-pp-live-2734

• Thursday June 21, 11:30 PM PDT – 11:32 PM PDT (Friday, June 22, 2:30 AM EDT – 2:32 AM EDT)
• During this brief 2 minute window, All PayPal payment methods (API, Website Payments Pro, Payflow, IPN notifications, etc…) will fail
• https://www.x.com/content/correction-jun-21-maintenance-pp-live-2674

• Thursday, June 28, 11:30 PM PDT – 11:40 PM PDT (Friday June 29, 2:30 AM EDT – 2:40 AM EDT)
• During this 10 minute window, All PayPal payment methods (API, Website Payments Pro, Payflow, etc…) will fail
• https://www.x.com/content/planned-downtime-during-jun-28-maintenance-pp-live-2714

Although these are small windows of downtime, it’s something to be aware of as a merchant, especially if PayPal is a major (or your only) source of orders being placed during these timeframes.

With IPN notifications being delayed, this can cause orders placed near these outage windows to be delayed in being received by your ecommerce application.

Hopefully PayPal is accurate with the outage times, and the overall impact to most merchants is quite small.