Reports have “Wall Street Gossips” talking about Apple working on a “PayPal killer”. This would be in the form of the iTunes store turning into a payment system.
There’s no telling how much truth there is to these rumors, but the world is going to need some more options when PayPal goes down, as it did last night, causing quite a stir across the web. PayPal apologized for this by way of the PayPal blog. SVP, Technology Scott Guilfoyle wrote:
At around 10:30 am PT Monday, a network hardware failure resulted in a service interruption for all PayPal users worldwide. Everyone in our organization focused immediately on identifying the issue and getting PayPal up and running again. We accomplished that in about an hour. By approximately 3 pm PT, full service was restored across our platform.
We’re now working to fully understand how we can prevent such a service interruption from ever happening again. We’re also reaching out to merchants to discuss the impact this interruption had on their businesses.
Of course we’re still expecting Facebook to unleash something in the payments department, so that should be interesting. If Apple and Facebook both become real competitors to PayPal, there’s no telling what the future will hold.
Meanwhile, Apple released a new iTunes Store for Mexico today. If they are thinking of turning iTunes into a payments system, it would be a good idea to get as many people around the world using it as possible first.
