The web site for Paypal is experiencing sporadic outages and sluggish response time tonight, with similar performance issues seen from multiple monitoring points. Performance problems for Paypal can have broad impact because the service processes payments for thousands of online businesses. The service, which enables any individual or business with an email address to send and receive payments online, has 86 million users worldwide. This chart shows the recent site performance for www.paypal.com.

A dynamically updating chart of the site performance for www.paypal.com is available here.

Paypal handled more than 117 million transactions in the third quarter of 2005, with a total value of $6.7 billion. The average transaction was about $57, and close to 70 percent of Paypal's business is generated by eBay, its parent company.

Netcraft provides performance monitoring for major web hosting providers, the Fortune 100, FTSE 100 and UK betting sites. Performance monitoring services are available for dedicated servers and other custom analyses.