PayPal isn't just a payment method — for many Shopify stores, it's the preferred checkout for a significant share of customers, particularly those who prefer not to enter card details directly. When PayPal goes down, those customers hit a dead end.
A PayPal outage won't break your entire checkout the way a Stripe outage would. But it will silently block every customer who tries to use PayPal — and that can be 20-40% of your checkout attempts depending on your audience.
Step 1: Confirm it's PayPal, not your integration
Go to www.paypal-status.com (PayPal's official status page). Check the components relevant to your setup: Checkout, PayPal.me, APIs, and Webhooks.
Signs of a PayPal outage:
- Customers clicking "Pay with PayPal" and getting an error or blank screen
- PayPal checkout button not loading on your storefront
- PayPal payments failing at the confirmation step after login
- Webhooks not firing for completed PayPal transactions
If the issue is only affecting certain regions or browsers, it may be a CDN or partial outage — still worth treating as urgent.
Step 2: Evaluate how much of your traffic uses PayPal
Pull your payment method breakdown from Shopify Analytics or your PayPal dashboard. This tells you the scale of the problem:
- If PayPal is less than 10% of checkouts, the impact is meaningful but contained
- If PayPal is 25%+ of checkouts, this is a significant revenue event and should be treated accordingly
Step 3: Add a store notice pointing customers to your other payment options
Most Shopify stores with PayPal also accept cards via Stripe or Shopify Payments. Add a short banner:
"PayPal is currently experiencing issues. You can still complete your purchase using a credit or debit card at checkout."
This redirects conversion-ready customers rather than losing them entirely.
Step 4: Consider pausing any PayPal-specific promotions
If you're running a promotion tied to PayPal ("Pay with PayPal and get 10% off"), pause or extend it for the duration of the outage. Sending traffic to a broken checkout option while running a PayPal promotion is a waste of spend and erodes trust.
Step 5: Monitor for webhook failures after recovery
PayPal outages sometimes cause webhook delivery failures — meaning orders that went through near the end of the outage may not have triggered your fulfillment or confirmation flows. After PayPal recovers, check your order log for any transactions from the outage window that are missing fulfillment confirmations or Klaviyo triggers.
How to know before your customers do
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PayPal outage checklist
- Confirm on paypal-status.com
- Check what percentage of your transactions use PayPal
- Add a banner directing customers to card checkout
- Pause any PayPal-specific promotions
- After recovery, audit orders from the outage window for missing webhooks