PayPal IPN keeps on delaying [AGAIN]

[Eric-Le]

Dear all,

About 2-3 days ago, we did experience a significant IPN delay, which affected us so badly. Fortunately, the issue was resolved after around 8 hours. Today, again, the IPN delay issue started happening again, which is very frustrating. Does anyone know why this issue is keep happening and any solution to fix it?

Thank you so much.

[Eric-Le]

@hmoorefd @motointegrator any update please?

[Arma76]

We're experiencing the same problem as you guys, over a few hundreds of retrying IPN messages, and since we sell digital products all the work we're doing now manually, I'm not sure how long we can continue to work this way....

[Eric-Le]

According to the info from @hmoorefd and @motointegrator, as you can see, we are all experiencing exactly the same issue. This is getting severe since we are all selling online products and this would increase the possibility of getting disputes from the customers which in return also harm the sellers. Don't even understand if this is the way PayPal protect the sellers. The weird part here, again is that their status page seems all green, which is quite funny. I have been browsing through tweets on Twitter and see a lot of sellers are having the same issue.

[gagans2k]

Hello

Paypal has finally come out with some information.

Issue here is at 2 levels.

1) Some websites are blocked at security level by them , so, ones who are testing via Paypal Simulator page  ( https://developer.paypal.com/dashboard/ipnSimulator )   are also getting  IPN Failed , handshake issues

This is because of  new found stupid method , where paypal partner ( They are promoting)   https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/  , needs to have correct category registered for your website.

If they fail to find category via bots , they are marking sites as Malware.

So, firstly you would need to visit   ( As per email received from paypal support )

* Visit https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/query/ and enter
your IPN URL listeners that are not working and search.
     * You might be able to see that the results suggest that there is
some malware.

    * Click on "Request Change" and provide some comments showing that

     * The Website URL/Domain is in good health and not servicing content
unexpectedly.
     * The Website URL/Domain is classified appropriately via 3rd party
domain/URL filtering products.

So, once you have done it , in 2-3 hours paypal simulator page will start to allow IPN handshake.

How stupid is it ..  this way this company gets our emails and would start bombarding us to purchase their software for security . Also, how stupid this method is.

2) Now coming to issue 2.

People whose websites are clearly categorized  and not receiving IPN  in actual ( Like me ) , but getting IPN Sent correctly via simulator of paypal , have to keep pushing paypal to resolve issue.

[Eric-Le]

I don't know how you get information at this detailed but thank you very much for sharing. Following what you mentioned, I checked my IPN listener via this link:  https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/query/ and see my IPN Listener is listed as low-risk. Information seems to be right.

[Eric-Le]

UPDATE:

After carefully checking, we have witnessed that a very small number of IPN messages got sent and our IPN listener was able to catch these messages. Though, they were sent successfully after at least 10 retries. This is a strong indication that something is very wrong on PayPal's side.

We also created a ticket for PayPal merchant technical support but not yet got an answer from them till now. If anyone know anything, please keep updating here. Thank you so much!

[motointegrator]

Hi,

We did not receive any update from paypal suppurt since yesterday. Yesterday I escalated this issue to our account manager and account executive in PAYPAL.

I checked status of our IPN Lister via https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/query/ and our listener is listed as low-risk same as @Eric-Le . I our case the last IPN message delivered (status=SENT) is from yesterday 05:56 PM CEST. 

Durring whole yesterday's evening and during the night we were manually fighting with payment confirmation (we used for this the flow bult by ourselves in MS Power Automate).

Fortunatelly today we are going to stop using PAYPAL as a payment gateway and we are going to launch new payment gateway which offers multiple payment methods, and paypal probably will be disabled for some time - until IPN issue will be fixed. This will allows us to manage orders infected by this issue and problem will be not growing like it has happend by last days. However we are operating in Germany where paypal is very popular so there is the risk that many customers will give up if they will not have option to pay via PAYPAL.

Other issue that we are facing also is that based on received IPN message we double check if payments made throught paypal in third-patries online marketplaces are indeed confirmed by paypal. No IPN means also that such orders have to be manually confrimed to be able to ship them afterthat.

This is the biggest **bleep**up since we started cooperation with paypal almost 10 years ago!

[Eric-Le]

@motointegrator  I can understand your feeling. I have been trying a lot of ways to contact PayPal, tried to inform them that their system has errors.  However, none of my message reach them (or at least, reach the right person). I called their customer center, they said they don't know, please fil-in this form, please open a ticket. Then, I openned a ticket and at least, few hours later I got the reply that is exactly what @hmoorefd got. Please fix it ASAP, PayPal, even the lastest versions of popular extensions / tools such as WooCommerce are currently relying on IPN.  This means that hundreds or even thousands of online sellers are being affected. 

Thank you for your help.

[Arma76]

Our listener is listed as low-risk but since yesterday nothing change, last IPN successfully delivered:

Latest delivery attempt date/ Time: 3 October 2023 at 13:30:58 CEST

Is there any email to PayPal support where we can send our complaint? 

[Eric-Le]

@Arma76 I'm not sure if their contact email address is exactly the same between us, I assume that it's not legit to publicly share their contact info here. What we did was just:

To create a case (choose Contact us):  https://www.paypal-support.com/s/?language=en_US

You may have to create an account or just login with you PayPal account. Then, you can create a ticket their and share more information with them. After several hours, someone may contact you but I highly doubt you will receive something very similar or event exactly what @hmoorefd shared because that was also what I got few hours ago.