Millions of users across the United States were unable to access their funds on PayPal and Venmo on Wednesday, 16 October 2025, after a major outage disrupted digital payment services for several hours.
The incident began around 11 a.m. Eastern Time, affecting core features such as account logins, sending and receiving payments, and transaction history. Both companies confirmed that engineers were working on resolving the problem after thousands of reports were filed online.
Timeline of the PayPal and Venmo Outage
According to real-time data from outage monitoring platforms, complaints started to spike shortly after 11 a.m. ET. According to Down Detector, reports surged to more than 10,000 for PayPal and over 8,000 for Venmo at the height of the disruption.
The issue affected multiple systems, including the PayPal homepage, transaction processing, Braintree integration and Venmo app functionality.
PayPal officially acknowledged a 'service disruption' on its system status page shortly after the reports peaked. The company confirmed that login and transaction services were among the components impacted.
By mid-afternoon, the number of reports began to decline as services gradually came back online. Some users, however, continued to experience access problems and transaction delays for several more hours.
Users Locked Out and Payments Delayed
The outage had a direct impact on users who rely on digital payment platforms for day-to-day transactions. Many reported being locked out of their accounts entirely, while others said payments appeared to be deducted from their balances without showing any transaction records or confirmation emails. This caused widespread confusion and frustration among individual users and small businesses.
On social media platform X, several users described struggling to pay rent or make urgent transfers. Others reported problems accessing transaction histories, printing shipping labels and processing sales, particularly for small online businesses.
On Reddit, affected users shared screenshots of error messages, login failures and incomplete transactions. The situation highlighted the risks of depending solely on digital wallets and cashless systems when outages occur unexpectedly.
PayPal and Venmo Issue Official Response
Venmo Support confirmed the outage. PayPal echoed the same message through its official status page, acknowledging the disruption and assuring customers that their funds remained secure.
At the time of reporting, neither company had provided a detailed explanation regarding the root cause of the outage. Restoration was confirmed to be underway during the afternoon, with services gradually becoming available to most users.
Recurring Technical Issues Raise Questions
This is not the first time PayPal and Venmo have experienced large-scale service interruptions in recent months. A similar disruption was recorded in August 2025, when thousands of users reported failed transactions and delayed fund transfers.
Status logs indicate that various components of PayPal's system have faced intermittent disruptions over the past several weeks.
Industry experts note that large fintech platforms rely on interconnected systems that, when disrupted, can lead to cascading service failures.
Outages affecting authentication systems, payment gateways and third-party integrations like Braintree can quickly escalate into national-scale service interruptions. Such incidents are being closely watched by regulators as they examine the resilience of critical digital payment infrastructure.
