By Bob Sullivan
Technology correspondent
MSNBC
Updated: 7:35 p.m. ET Oct. 11, 2004

PayPal.com, eBay's electronic payment arm, was suffering intermittent outages on Monday, according to the company. The problems actually began on Friday, according to PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires, after the firm added some "code enhancements" to the site.

"Some people have been able to transact, other people have not," she said. "We are currently looking at these issues and dedicating the appropriate resources to getting it fixed."

Auction watchdog Rosalinda Baldwin, who runs The Auction Guild, said she thought the problems were connected to a recent design update for PayPal, but Pires said the outage wasn't related to a redesign.

"We saw a small issue on Friday," after adding some new programming code to the site Thursday evening, she said. "We believed we solved it. But there were intermittent problems on Sunday, and then today."

PayPal is an important cog in eBay.com. The company claims it has more than 50 million account members and is available to users in 45 countries around the world. Last year, the firm handled $12 billion in transactions.

It's not clear how many members were impacted by the outage. But in an odd crossover from the cyberworld to the real world, some PayPal-branded ATM cards weren't working either, Pires confirmed.

Baldwin said the outage is causing trouble with some account balances.

"When folks go to use their PayPal debit cards, the payment is rejected, but the charge actually goes through and PayPal is deducting the amount from their account," she said. "From what I hear, a call to PayPal does correct the problem, but what a mess!"

Pires said the company is working as quickly as it can to solve the problem, but didn't have a time estimate.

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URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6228586/