What should I do if PayPal is down for me?

Try a different payment method, since incidents usually hit one card network or local rail rather than all of them. Check whether the failure is at checkout or at settlement, because the two run on separate systems. Look for elevated decline rates in your dashboard rather than outright errors, which is how most payment incidents first appear. Do not retry a charge repeatedly, as duplicate attempts can succeed later and produce double billing.

Payments

Is PayPal down right now?

No, it’s up.

PayPal appears to be up and running normally.

checked 2026-09-18 23:05 UTC

responded in 234ms

HTTP 200

Over the last 7 days, PayPal has answered our automated checks with 100.00% availability and a typical response time of ~442 ms. No outages have been recorded in the last 90 days.

PayPal handles consumer payments, checkout for merchants, and money transfers across most of the world. Because it acts as both wallet and gateway, an incident can stop merchant checkouts while consumer balances remain accessible, or block one funding source while cards continue to work.

Is PayPal down for everyone or just you?

Our automated checks are reaching PayPal normally right now, and it answered our last one in 234ms. That makes any trouble you are hitting more likely to be local to your connection, account or network than a full outage, which usually means you can fix it from your end.

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PayPal response time (last 24h)

Last 24h

peak 1928 ms

PayPal incident history (last 90 days)

JulAugSep

up
slow
down
no reading

No incidents in the last 90 days, from our checks or PayPal’s own status page.

PayPal uptime

100.00%
7 days: 100.00%
30 days: 100.00%
90 days

Measured since 2026-08-12. Windows reaching further back are averaged over the 38 days we watched, not the full period. Counts our own checks. Days PayPal reported an incident are coloured in the timeline above but do not change this figure.

What to do if PayPal is down for just you

Try a different payment method, since incidents usually hit one card network or local rail rather than all of them.
Check whether the failure is at checkout or at settlement, because the two run on separate systems.
Look for elevated decline rates in your dashboard rather than outright errors, which is how most payment incidents first appear.
Do not retry a charge repeatedly, as duplicate attempts can succeed later and produce double billing.

Frequently asked questions

PayPal appears to be up and running normally. Last checked 2026-09-18 23:05 UTC.

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