PayPal Express Checkout Produces 503 Error in my OpenCart 2.3.0.2 website

[dan1213]

Hi All,

Out of the Blue yesterday, I get a call from a woman who is struggling to put an order through on one of my 30+ opencart 2.3.0.2 websites.   She says she keeps getting a 503 Service Unavailable error, while confirming her order on the website.   It won't direct her to PayPal to complete the purchase, just gives this 503 error.

So I investigate the issue.    I had sales coming in normally on 10th of December, up until 7pm, after that I had no sales whatsoever across all websites on 11th or 12th December.

I have spent most of the day investigating this issue.

Something has happened, after 7pm on Friday, that seems to be causing this error.    It is affecting all my 30 websites, in exactly the same way.   I Go to checkout via PayPal Express Checkout and I keep getting a 503 error.

I have spent the whole day moving my websites over to use PayPal Payments Standard, but this has led to more issues.......The website now accepts an order, the customer can pay and checkout OK, however, with PayPal payment standard, very strangely no order email is sent to the customer or myself for confirmation, like it should do normally, and not only that but no new order appears in the backend opencart admin system.    If it wasn't for the PayPal receipt confirmation, you wouldn't know a sale had been made.   But why is not showing up at all in the backend admin for opencart?   

Well...   

If you navigate to the corresponding SQL Database, in the ocyc_order table, and sort by Key:  Primary Descending, you can see that the new order does appear in the database table, however, I believe the order_status_ID on a new completed order should be set to 5, but it shows as 0.    This is the reason the order is not coming up in the opencart admin area, as if you edit the table entry for that order and set the order_status_ID  manually to 5 and save, then the order appears in the opencart admin area, where it should be.   

So the question is:

Why is a successful order and PayPal standard payment completion triggering an order_status_ID of 0 instead of a 5?

So I have 2 issues.   

1)  PayPal Express Payments triggering a 503 error all of a sudden since 7pm on 10th December which is affecting all of my websites.  Websites have been working fine for 8 years prior to this issue.

2) Having moved to PayPal Standard across all websites - which I assumed would fix the problem - This has led to a new problem with it not setting the order_status_ID properly to a 5 for newly completed and paid orders.

I have left 1 website:    seedsforsale.uk      using the PayPal express payment, so you can confirm the error by just adding one item to basket, and then clicking on the Prominent PAYPAL EXPRESS logo, this triggers the 503 error.

All other websites are using standard PayPal payments so at least some money is coming in.   Although its a hassle to pull the data from the databases, at the moment I am manually manipulating the sale to an order_status_ID of 5 to get it in to the backend admin system for the website.

Any Help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Daniel.