PayPal Worldwide Outage Has Gamblers Panicking

PayPal, one of the most utilized means of funding online gambling accounts worldwide, experienced a brief outage worldwide on Thursday, it confirmed.

It said in a post on its service status page it was experiencing "a system issue" that affecting multiple PayPal Products - including account withdrawal and express checkout.

The company said the technical issue was swiftly resolved.

Despite being down only briefly, users reported being unable to log in to their accounts or said they were having problems making payments.

Many gamblers expressed concern that their accounts had been hacked.

Platform outage monitor Downdetector had received more than seven thousand reports from users as of 12:12 GMT, or just prior to 9 am EST.

According to the company's service status dashboard, the incident began at 10:53 UTC.

It said its cryptocurrency services and peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo, were among its services affected by the outage.

Customers took to social media to post about not being able to access their accounts.

Several users on X, formerly Twitter, posted screenshots of an alert telling them "please check your entries and try again" when attempting to log in.

Founded in 1998, PayPal has grown to become a major, global financial institution and was among the first platforms of its type to enter into the booming online gambling industry of the early 2000's, albeit only briefly.  PayPal would ultimately return to the sector, primarily in Europe, years later.