I am slowly learning about the issues with relying on an Internet
service like PayPal. They have somehow totally screwed up their
software, and it is no longer calling our system to notify us of
payments as of today.

We use PayPal to allow our 80211.net
Internet customers to purchase Internet Access on-line. When they
make a payment, they expect to be able to use the Internet
immediately. This has been working great up until now, using the
PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service. Somehow PayPal
has screwed up their systems, and the IPN notifications are no longer
hitting our server … so people are paying, and their accounts are not
being updated. So today I have been fielding calls and having to
manually credit people’s accounts … which sucks.

This is just another example of where the concepts around the Internet
and hosted services breaks down. It is really too bad that PayPal
didn’t test their software updates better before deploying them on
their “live” site. People complain about Microsoft and Windows
… but this is a more important example to me since it is costing me
time and money … and there is no one that is going to recover the
costs for me.