What’s Going On With PayPal? Is eBay Communications Clueless?

Yesterday I logged into PayPal and attempted to "accept" a payment. When I click accept, it goes to a page that has an html title of "page not found" and a link to "try again". I waited 24 hours and then contacted support. Moments ago I received the following response:

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is Reimer, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding accepting an 'unclaimed' payment, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue.  I am happy to assist you with your questions.

Unfortunately, that error is a known issue that is already being worked on by our technical personnel and we are still waiting for any updates about the timeframe for the fix. At the moment the suggested work around is to deny the payment and have it re-sent to the other email address in your PayPal account.

We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter, and wish you continued success on PayPal.

Sincerely,
Reimer
PayPal Community Support, PayPal, an eBay Company

Now I read a lengthy comment stream on TechCrunch about an issue receiving PayPal subscription payments. There are also threads on PayPal along with a developer blog entry about the issue. Amie commented (my emphasis):

Yup, we’ve been seriously impacted. At current time, we have over 2600 subscribers via PayPal with the bulk of our subscriptions automatically renewing at the beginning of the month, which has just passed, and we budget accordingly. 95% of our income for our business comes in via PayPal subscriptions. Right now, we can’t pay our employees and pretty soon bills are going to start bouncing. In short, we’re screwed.

First, WHY is there no message on the PayPal home page about the issue? How many people know to go to the developer section to find out what's going on? I doubt many. Also, with all of the issues around another eBay company, Skype, last month, why is eBay allowing another major outage to be so poorly handled? Wouldn't it make sense to do a quick account scan and email anyone who has sent or received a subscription payment in the last 60 days? Is it so hard to communicate with your customers?

It's easy for us to say we will move to another IM/Phone client or another micropayments service, but who else is there? eBay knows they are the only major player in the markets they serve. Oh well, guess my payment will be there soon, it's not enough for me to get crazy over (yet), but I totally understand Amie's and the other's concerns.