micropulse Blog

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@paypal.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

THIS MEANS THAT PAYPAL IS DOWN!!

I got this message over the weekend on 3rd and 4th May (Australia time).  Perhaps PayPal were doing some upgrades??
I’ve been trawling the internet for an answer to why I’m getting this error message.  I (and my customers) assumed that it was some sort of html code error, however, I hadn’t changed the code for over a year and it was working fine.
I’ve Googled a couple of blogs and the paypal developer blog site and it would appear to be a glitch with PayPal.
The odd thing was that when I tried again (via refresh) a couple of minutes later, it worked fine.

I’ve now changed my web page to inform the purchaser that if an error occurs, please click the PayPal button to try again.

I’ve also added a message to ask them to resort to a manual PayPal transaction if they have no success via my program.
One would think that PayPal would avoid these sorts of outages!!
I wonder how many thousand transactions were lost because of this?
If these sorts of problems continue, people will be leaving PayPal in droves.  And what about all those eBay customers??

Have you had the same or a similar experience?