PayPal’s online payment service was unavailable for over an hour from 6.30pm onwards UK time on Monday, according to reports.

The outage was due to an “internal issue”, according to a PayPal spokesman, with users of the payment service across the world affected. Although the problem was said to have only lasted an hour, the spokesman admitted that it took five hours for the service to be fully restored.

PayPal is active in 190 countries, with 75 million active accountholders, and supports payments in 19 currencies. Some 22 million PayPal accounts have been set up in the UK, and it is accepted as a payment method on more than 165,000 websites across Europe.

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