Suddenly receiving "Authorization failed due to insufficient permissions" intermittently

[Carrot3]

We are using, I think it's called Advanced Card Payments.  The integration was done a couple of years ago so terminology might have changed since.

The end point in question is https://api.paypal.com/v1/identity/generate-token

This has worked fine for the last 2 years until today.  Now, intermittently, we are receiving a 403 response back saying, "Authorization failed due to insufficient permissions"

If the request is attempted multiple times eventually it will work and display the payment fields.

Not sure what to do as nothing has changed at our end and the issue seems to be intermittent, although the error is occuring more often than not.

Thanks,

[aviator123]

Happening to us too, our entire production payments system is down.

Not intermittently, the API call fails 100% of the time.

[Carrot3]

Thanks for your reply.  When did this start happening to you?

I think our issues started first thing in the morning today (October 29th).

We are calling `/v1/oauth2/token` first which is working, then `/v1/identity/generate-token` afterwards which is returning a 403 response with the error "Authorization failed due to insufficient permissions"

I have tried from my local PC using Postman and get the same result.  When I switch to the sandbox credentials it works okay.

The problem was intermittent at first, but I think it returns the 403 status every single time now.

[aviator123]

Yes, our last successful payment was today (Oct. 29) around 7am US Pacific. And yes, the first call is to /v1/oauth2/token which is successful; the second call, to /v1/identity/generate-token fails.

We've opened a merchant support ticket and linked to this discussion in that; as many other companies as possible doing the same might help get their attention faster.

This is a problem with Advanced Payments -> Hosted Fields, which is deprecated (but PayPal certainly hasn't communicated anything about that option being unusable after a particular date). The newer integration is Advanced Payments -> "Card Fields":

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/advanced/sdk/v1/

[Carrot3]

Thanks, I didn't realise Hosted Fields was deprecated, I hadn't received anything to be made aware of this.  In fact, PayPal were all over us like a rash to implement this payment solution at the time, and it doesn't feel like that long ago (May 2022).  I remember it was an absolute mare to implement at the time, mainly due to incomplete and ambiguous documentation coupled with missing/incorrect test card numbers.

In any case, it should not stop working without notice.

[aviator123]

Yep, their developer documentation is the worst I think I've seen in ~15 years as a CTO.

PayPal if you're reading this: you need to completely move all of your dev docs to a new platform. Whatever you use now is nearly unreadable (formatting-wise), and is organized horribly.

I'll update this thread when we hear back from them about the problem. Again anyone reading this please, please go open a merchant technical support ticket about this. Good luck figuring out how to open a ticket, it's like walking through a corn maze drunk with a blindfold on.

[Carrot3]

It's been close to 24 hours now and no reply to our ticket, however our payments seem to be working again now, how about you @aviator123 ?

[Dredy]

Hi, same here.
I resolved creating a new APP in the developer Portal, with new credentials.

I think it's probably enough to create a new pair of Client ID and Secret in the same app, but not tried yet.

Regards

[aviator123]

It's astounding -- they broke production, literally any company that uses Advanced Payments is down/none of their customers can purchase anything -- and PayPal hasn't even acknowledged a problem in 24 hours.

I've seen bad technical support, but I haven't seen "24 hours of prod downtime with zero action" bad.