PayPal down: customers unable to make payments on Black Friday

PAYMENT service PayPal has gone down for some customers, leaving them unable to access accounts to make payments on Black Friday.

The issue appears to affect both customers in the UK and the US.

Customers across the UK are complaining about problems with PayPal

The problems started just before 5pm today, with more than 500 customers reporting issues at its peak, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

Of those who are struggling, 84% of users are reporting problems to log in while 13% complain about issues with sending payments.

One user complained on Twitter: “@AskPayPal why am I not getting text verification codes when I’m trying to place an order? Is PayPal down??”

While another added: “Paypal down for anyone else? Two Factor authentication not working?”

The problems appear to have started before 5pm today, with more than 500 customers reporting issues at its peak

And a third commented: “OH THANK GOD. I was freaking out why I wasn’t getting a verification code. Glad it’s not just me.”

The Sun has asked PayPal to confirm when the issues are set to be fixed, and we’ll update this article once we hear back.

TSB’s banking app and website also went down today leaving customers locked out of accounts on payday.

Websites have struggled on as Brits went on a £2million-a-minute spending spree.

Thousands of customers have been queuing to get on Boots and Cult Beauty’s websites, while others struggled to get onto Curry’s PC World.

Experts blame shops’ lockdown causing a huge spike in web demand across Black Friday sales as a whole – 70% bigger than last year’s Black Friday.

Nationwide has reported 2.3million transactions already, as of lunchtime today, while eBay said it has sold two items every second.

It comes after last week’s launch of PlayStation5 – just one product – saw Currys forced to implement a queue to access its website, and John Lewis, Tesco and GAME’s websites would not load.

But it was a different picture for physical stores in England, with pictures showing Lakeside shopping centre empty on Black Friday.

The shopping centre is partially open, with only essential retailers open.

However, shoppers have been seen queuing outside Primark in Cardiff, where non-essential shops are allowed to stay open.

Today’s £1.93billion web blowout works out at £2.01m-a-minute over the 16 hours most people are awake.

This is up on the previous record £1.56m-a-minute set on last year’s Cyber Monday, a VoucherCodes.co.uk study with the Centre for Retail Research showed.

This post first appeared on thesun.co.uk