Sporadic outages at PayPal stretched into a fifth day on Tuesday, though the company late in the day reported that access had returned to normal for most users. Even as access appeared to be improving, the effect of the payment service"s troubles was rippling among sellers and buyers who had lost sales and begun questioning its reliability.
PayPal, based in San Jose, Calif., and owned by eBay Inc., is the major online payment system for eBay auctions as well as smaller e-commerce sites. The intermittent outages caused problems across the service, from access to the site and account information to PayPal"s debit card and shipment services. The problems began on Friday after PayPal conducted a monthly software update. They subsided on Saturday, only to resurface on Sunday and worsen through at least early Tuesday, according to PayPal users and statements from the company.