Network outage forces PayPal rethink

US bank Wells Fargo has resolved its second network outage in four days prompting bill payment service PayPal to switch to its backup payments provider.

System problems at the banking giant prevented many consumers from logging into their online banking accounts on Monday.

The company blamed the downtime on a "network connectivity" issue that was cleared up Monday night.

"We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers and thank them for their patience," the bank said in a statement Monday evening.

However, PayPal was still using its backup payments provider on Tuesday, said spokeswoman Julie Anderson.

"We'll switch back to Wells Fargo as soon as the issues are resolved," she said. The bank is putting in place a dedicated T1 line to handle PayPal payments traffic, which should help address network connection problems affecting PayPal, Wells Fargo spokeswoman Andrea Mahoney said.

The problems on Monday follow a more than eight-hour outage on Friday at Wells Fargo that similarly prevented some customers from accessing their accounts. In April, Wells Fargo experienced several days' worth of intermittent access problems with its online banking site.

Wells Fargo operates one of the most popular online banking services, with more than 3 million customers.

Wells Fargo began experiencing network problems at around 9:20 a.m. PDT on Monday, Mahoney said. The company resolved the network issue at around 6 p.m., Mahoney said.

Around noon on Monday, PayPal switched its credit card processing from Wells Fargo to Electronic Payment Exchange (EPX), said Anderson.

Wells Fargo took over PayPal's payment processing from EPX under a deal PayPal and Wells Fargo announced in June. But PayPal has kept EPX as its backup provider. Although EPX will process the company's credit card payments on an interim basis, PayPal plans to eventually switch back to Wells Fargo, Anderson said.

Troy Wolverton writes for News.com