Are Venmo and PayPal down? Users report issues on October 16 for payment services

UPDATE: Oct. 16, 2025, 2:08 p.m. PayPal acknowledged a Thursday outage in a statement to Mashable, but said the problem has been fixed. "PayPal and Venmo experienced a brief service disruption that has since been resolved," a spokesperson wrote in an email.

UPDATE: Oct. 16, 2025, 12:59 p.m. EDT The number of user-reported issues for PayPal and Venmo dropped off precipitously on Down Detector, indicating the problem had been resolved. The payment services' status page indicated all services were operational.

Both Venmo and PayPal saw a spike in user-reported issues on Down Detector on Thursday, Oct. 16. That signaled the payment services could be having issues.

(Disclosure: Down Detector is owned by Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.)

PayPal and Venmo are part of the same company, so it tracks that both might experience problems at the same time. I was able to access Venmo on my phone at about 12:25 p.m. ET, but there remained a number of complaints online from folks who could not do the same.

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Users began reporting issues with the payment services on Down Detector at around 11 a.m. ET. PayPal's status page indicated all its services, including Venmo, were operational at about 12:30 p.m., but it remained unclear if all users' issues were actually resolved.

This story is developing and will be updated as necessary...