Overview

• Several banks, including BayernLB, Helaba and DZ Bank, blocked PayPal Lastschriften after a surge of suspicious instructions, with estimates suggesting more than €10 billion was paused and about €4 billion at BayernLB alone.
• The German Sparkassen association confirmed unauthorized PayPal debit attempts and reported significant effects on European payment traffic, with Sparkassen flows restored Tuesday morning under continued monitoring.
• Merchants faced delayed receipts and customers saw misleading “insufficient funds” notices in PayPal, while backlogs of blocked transactions require manual review expected to take days.
• PayPal described the incident as a temporary service interruption, said the cause was quickly identified and accounts were updated, though reports indicated some transactions still failed Tuesday evening.
• Regulators have been informed, with oversight led from Luxembourg and inquiries reported by European authorities, and a recent dark‑web cache of roughly 15–16 million credentials remains unlinked to the outage as consumers are urged to review accounts and strengthen authentication.