Oh Dear… Paypal.
Paypal has been borked most of the day. I was able to login and check my balance this morning (around 7:30AM) before leaving for Baltimore, not suspecting any sort of problem. I did note the new homepage they’ve been talking about, and might I say it is hideous and stupid, but that is beside the point.
When I arrived back home I wanted to check on things before leaving again, but couldn’t login, couldn’t even get to the website for that matter. A couple of hours ago and it still wasn’t working, I stopped using the debit card this afternoon because I couldn’t verify my funds… the sort of thing I do all the time between shopping trips, just to make sure that the money I think I have, well, making sure I actually do have it in there… automatic things and other random shit can cause problems. There was also that little incident last month where $60 reversed out because my brother used the wrong bank account to send me a payment, heh, of course I’d get an email about that sort of insanity.
Anyway, I used my debit card around 5PM at Walmart to get coffee & an airwick refill, something like seven dollars, so no biggie, I didn’t give any thought to debit cards not working if the website stopped working.
Apparently Paypal entire system is now rather intensely fucked up. I discovered this after I decided to look around online to find out what the hell is happening. Major outages in the hours upon hours level is unheard of when dealing with such huge companies; redundancy is the rule, not the exception. There are all sorts of rumors circulating, ranging from DDoS, being hacked because of security flaws in the new homepage, and the quasi-official line of system glitches with software unrelated to the new homepage… sure, I believe that.
It also seems that Paypal has essentially locked ALL accounts, or at least that’s what I’m reading, and we all know to believe everything we read on the internet, lol. Tons of people on the Ebay forums are reporting their debit cards are dead… declined for everything. I sure as hell am glad that didn’t happen to me today, because my debit card was the only thing I was going to be using for my little trips to Towson Town Center and IKEA… if I’d have been declined at IKEA because the Paypal system was fuxored, well, that would have made my entire trip totally worthless. While Baltimore isn’t super far away, it’s a good three hours roundtrip when dealing with beltway traffic (something nearly constant since there is construction on the beltway these days).
I’ve been a little hard on myself for “spending money like water” …especially after the trip to Philly this past weekend, but now, in light of this paypal situation, I’m kind of glad the balance is so painfully low, lol, irony… being happy I’m broke. Of course I get payments through Paypal nearly everyday, so if this continues I’m going to be a bit screwed, either the money will still go into the account and I’ll not be able to use it, or I won’t get the money at all, lose-lose situation.
Related, in the financial sense, but not to Paypal, my bank charged me $40 in “excess transaction fees” recently for moving my money from savings to checking too often…. what the hell is that about? It seems an online transfer of funds is considered a check, and you can’t be writing checks out of your savings account… that’s what a checking account is for, duh. That’s a serious flaw in the system right there… I should be allowed to move money however often I want. It seems that such restriction was not in place when I opened the accounts years ago, online banking didn’t even exist at the time (with them), and somehow, amazingly, I’ve never done more than six transactions. I called my branch manager and she fixed it right away (refunded the fees), and we had a little chat about it. It’s truly stupid and she agrees with me (or at least feigned agreement), but I guess there’s nothing we can really do. I just need to remember not to make more than six transfers a month… easy enough, it was those little $25 moves so I’d not ‘accidently’ spend $100 at Walmart when I only went for $10 worth of shit. From talking with the branch manager it seems that quite a few people have run into this ‘excess transaction’ problem just like I did, and for the same reasons — keeping money in savings as a way of staying on budget and not overspending.