account admin affected buyers codes contact customers down email free ipn issue link order payment paypal posting previously problem process product questions return seller send show showing site support system thread working

Once again, PayPal seems to be having a problem issuing some IPNs:

http://www.pdncommunity.com/pdn/board/message?board.id=ipn& message.id=10795

Please feel free to join that forum and post your own complaint about IPNs being down again. Initial reports indicate this instance is primarily affecting non-USD transactions, so most US-based Merchants and Buyers may not be affected. In these cases (missing/delayed IPN), our system would not know that a transaction has completed, so you may need to placate affected customers by processing their order manually (use your "Send free thank-you email/download link", etc.). The affected transactions ~do~ show up in your PayPal log (they just aren't notifying us in return), so you can verify whether a customer's payment has been made by looking in your PayPal account logs.

BTW, whenever you notice an outage like this (where PayPal is completing payments but those payments stopped showing up in your E-junkie txn logs) we would encourage you to contribute some notification/complaint about it to the PayPal Developer forums at:
http://www.pdncommunity.com/pdn/forums
The more people participate there, posting heads-ups and complaints when PayPal IPNs stop working, the more likely PayPal will notice there's a problem and will (hopefully) work to fix it promptly.

BTW, if you choose to process any lagging-IPN transactions manually by sending a free email/link, and if you don't want our system to send another email/link when PayPal catches up with their IPNs (this could be particularly important when you are sending stored/generated codes), then you should copy the transaction ID from PayPal for each affected transaction, and then paste those into your Seller Admin > "Block buyers & transactions" screen. This will tell our system to ignore the IPN and not issue the email for those transactions you specify.

FYI, PayPal still appears to be having ongoing problems with delayed or invalid IPNs, and these do not affect only non-USD payments as was suspected previously.

See the pdncommunity forum thread (7 pages of replies and counting!) linked above for further details (as they have not posted nor officially even acknowledged the issue elsewhere yet!).

PayPal has finally posted public acknowledgment of this ongoing issue at
http://www.pdncommunity.com/pdn/blog/article?message.uid=78689

---

PayPal, Inc.
Merchant Technical Services Notification

This notification is designed to inform you of the
following ON-GOING IPN issue:

Service:
- PayPal Live Site

Affected Product(s):
- Order Management (IPN / PDT)

Start Time:
- May 15, 2008 6:00 AM PDT (May 15, 2008 2:00 PM BST)

End Time:
- On-Going

During this time some merchants may be receiving an INVALID response for some IPNs. Our technical teams are working diligently to resolve the
issue. We will provide updates until the issue is resolved.


Additional Information:
From approximately May 16, 2008 10:57 AM PDT (May 16, 2008 6:57 PM BST) to
May 16, 2008 2:58 PM PDT (May 16, 2008 10:58 PM BST) we experienced intermittent
delays with IPN as well, not related to intermittent INVALID IPNs.
This particular issue has been resolved.


We apologize for any impact caused by these incidents.

Sincerely,
PayPal Merchant Technical Support Team

Contacting PayPal
===============
If you have questions, contact PayPal Merchant Technical
Support by going to https://www.paypal.com/mts and filing a
ticket under Contact Support.

PO

PayPal says that this issue is resolved now.