PayPal fixes outage that affected thousands worldwide

Illustration shows broken Ethernet cable and PayPal logo

(Reuters) -Payments firm PayPal said on Thursday it had resolved an issue that led to a global outage affecting thousands of users for nearly two hours.

The company experienced a system issue that affected multiple products including account withdrawals, peer-to-peer payment service Venmo, online checkout and crypto.

PayPal said the issue, which started at 1053 GMT, had been resolved as of 1259 GMT.

Exchanges Coinbase and Kraken had also posted about outages with PayPal transactions and deposit delays, respectively, on their websites.

The outage occurred on a day bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, has surged to levels to over $98,000 and pulled other crypto stocks along with it.

PayPal allows its clients to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrency.

Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted reports, had said there were nearly 9,000 reports of problems with PayPal transactions as of 1226 GMT.

(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil and Pritam Biswas in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)