If you were planning to send anyone any money for dinner last night, you might need to wait a while. Both PayPal and Venmo are down as of 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET on October 16. Thousands of reports on Downdetector make it clear that the outage for the two payment services is widespread. At the time of writing, over 8,400 users have reported problems with accessing PayPal, while over 7,800 users are similarly struggling to access Venmo.
The problems seem to have started at around 11:00 a.m. ET. When I tried to open the Venmo app on my phone, I was promptly logged out of my account. Some users have also seen the following error message: “We’re sorry. We’re having some trouble completing your request right now. Please try again shortly, and if it persists, let us know.” Oddly enough, PayPal’s official status page doesn’t show any issues and claims that all production systems are operational. Thousands of users struggling to load the apps on their mobile device would beg to differ.
Why are PayPal and Venmo down?
We still don’t know exactly what caused these outages. PayPal owns Venmo, but the two still exist as separate services. The official Ask PayPal account on X has not issued a statement of any kind, but is responding to dozens of complaints on the social media platform from users who can’t access the services. “We understand the inconvenience you are facing at the moment,” the account has said to multiple users, in a seemingly automated response. “Please be assured that our team is working on the ongoing issue and will try to resolve it at the earliest.”
As soon as we find out more about the outages, we’ll be sure to provide an update. In the meantime, you can keep checking the apps, as Venmo has managed to load for me on occasion over the past few minutes. In all likelihood, this issue will be resolved in the coming hours.
UPDATE: As of around 1:00 p.m. ET, the outages appear to be over. Reports on Downdetector began to taper off at around 12:30 p.m. as the issues were resolved. PayPal shared the following statement with Tom’s Guide regarding the outages: “PayPal experienced a brief technical issue impacting users that has since been resolved.”
