On the morning of August 1, 2025, millions of users across the United States were affected by a significant service outage impacting both PayPal and Venmo. The disruption began around 8:45–9:00 a.m. Eastern Time and left users temporarily unable to send or receive funds through either platform—two of the most widely used digital payment services in the country.
Reports from users indicated that, while they could access their account balances and apps appeared to function normally, actual transaction processing stalled or failed. In many instances, attempted payments would remain in a pending state, or would appear to complete for the sender, but the recipient would never see a notification or an update to their account balance.
This simultaneous disruption across both services can be traced to Venmo’s status as a subsidiary of PayPal. As the outage unfolded, user complaints surged on monitoring websites, with platforms such as DownDetector registering over 1,000 incident reports in a short period. PayPal’s official service status monitor acknowledged ongoing issues affecting Retail Checkout, Online Checkout, and Reporting platforms, while Venmo was initially displayed as “operational,” despite clear user difficulties.
In response to the growing concern, PayPal promptly confirmed the existence of an issue and indicated that technical teams were actively working to restore full service. By late morning, both PayPal and Venmo services began recovering, though intermittent payment failures were still noted by some users.
