PayPal experienced a two hour outage on Thursday evening resulting in payments using the PayPal gateway to timeout and not be completed.

This outage affected a large number of sites, including eBay, and Etsy. All eCommerce sites hosted by Scarab Media, Project A Inc that use PayPal as a merchant payment gateway also were affected by this outage.

Of course, shoppers, in many cases, could have switched to using their credit cards for their online shopping. So merchants may not have lost sales entirely during this outage.

PayPal issued the following statement regarding the outage: “The network experienced an intermittent interruption during a period of relatively low traffic at 7pm PT. This interruption was caused by a data center power outage and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”