Payments firm PayPal (PYPL.O) announced it had resolved a global outage that disrupted services for nearly two hours today (Thursday). The issue began at 1053 GMT.

It affected multiple PayPal products, including account withdrawals, the Venmo peer-to-peer payment service, online checkout, and cryptocurrency services. By 1259 GMT, PayPal confirmed that the issue had been resolved.

PayPal Outage Disrupts Crypto Services

During the outage, crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken reported issues, including delays with PayPal transactions and deposits. The disruption coincided with a surge in bitcoin’s price, which reached over $98,000.

PayPal enables users to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency. According to Downdetector, there were almost 9,000 user reports of problems by 1226 GMT.

PayPal is currently experiencing a major outage impacting multiple products & site features. 🚨#Paypaldown pic.twitter.com/AJO7TRXiei

— Liz Morton ~ Value Added Resource (@ValueAddedRS) November 21, 2024

Outages Disrupt Trading for Robinhood and LCG

In April of the previous year, state securities regulators, led by Alabama, imposed a fine of up to $10.2 million on Robinhood’s brokerage subsidiary for what they described as 'operational and technical failures' that affected retail investors.

The fine follows a seven-state investigation into the firm’s retail market activities from early 2020 to 2021. NASAA, in a statement, noted that an outage on Robinhood’s platform in March 2020 prompted the investigation. At the time, 'hundreds of thousands of investors' used the app to trade stocks and cryptocurrencies.

In June, London Capital Group (LCG), a forex and contracts for differences broker owned by Flowbank, experienced an IT outage that impacted its trading platforms as well as back and middle office systems. The disruption lasted approximately four days, affecting both the London and Bahamas operations, as reported by Finance Magnates.

LCG has since confirmed that its trading platforms are 'back online,' though IT-related issues remain unresolved. Traders can now access their accounts via a new web address and must reset their passwords, though MT4 users are able to log in as usual.