If you planned to send anyone money for dinner last night, you might have run into trouble. Both PayPal and Venmo suffered a widespread outage on October 16, beginning around 11:00 a.m. ET. According to Downdetector, thousands of users were unable to access either platform, with more than 8,400 reports for PayPal and roughly 7,800 for Venmo as of 9:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. ET.
Users attempting to log in to their accounts reported being unexpectedly signed out or greeted with an error message saying, “We’re sorry. We’re having some trouble completing your request right now. Please try again shortly, and if it persists, let us know.” Despite these issues, PayPal’s official status page curiously claimed that all systems were fully operational — a statement at odds with the experiences of thousands of frustrated customers.
Why were PayPal and Venmo down?
The exact cause of the disruption remains unclear. PayPal owns Venmo, but the two services operate independently. While the official Ask PayPal account on X (formerly Twitter) did not provide a formal explanation, it did respond to numerous user complaints with a generic reply: “We understand the inconvenience you are facing at the moment. Please be assured that our team is working on the ongoing issue and will try to resolve it at the earliest.”
Throughout the outage, functionality appeared to fluctuate. Some users were intermittently able to open the Venmo app, though performance remained inconsistent.
Resolution
By about 1:00 p.m. ET, the situation had stabilized. Reports on Downdetector began to drop around 12:30 p.m., suggesting that service gradually returned to normal. PayPal confirmed the recovery in a statement shared with Tom’s Guide: “PayPal experienced a brief technical issue impacting users that has since been resolved.”
For now, both apps appear to be functioning normally again, though the temporary outage served as an unwelcome reminder of just how dependent many users have become on digital payment platforms.
