Why are my DoDirectPayment calls ignored?

Question

I've been sending DoDirectPayment calls to PayPal for years with no problem and recently I've had periods of an hour or more where these calls don't get answered by PayPal and after about four minutes the cURL software that sent the call times out and generates the error:

            DoDirectPayment failed: couldn't connect to host(7)

Then suddenly, after an hour or more of no customers being able to make a payment, and without me doing anything on my end, the calls start getting answered again by PayPal and people can again make payments.

It acts like the PayPal server gets overloaded and drops requests. Then when their load goes down they start answering all their requests again.

The $API_Endpoint the cURL is using is https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp. The version of the PayPal protocol I'm using is 95.0.

Has anyone else experienced this or know what might be going on?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

I have not heard of anyone else reporting any issues similar to this. A couple of things that you may want to check into is with your hosting provider to make sure they were not having any type of network and check PayPal's Site Status pages to see if there were any outages or updates going on at the times you experienced the issues, as they could of caused the issues you are seeing.