The Business Centre

A technical dispute between BigPond and PayPal has been resolved after BigPond cable users had been unable to login to the payment site for over a week.

Affected users, mainly in NSW and Queensland, had been unable to collect payments, square debts and access orders on eBay since April 19, according to discussions on the Whirlpool forum.

When contacted by Computerworld on Tuesday afternoon PayPal Australia spokesperson Daniel Feiler said he did not know what caused the problem.

"We are not 100 per cent sure what the problem is [and] we are currently investigating and working closely with Bigpond," Feiler said. "There have been quite sporadic and isolated cases, and only a handful of reports have come through."

However, shortly afterwards a fix was in place.

The company refused to detail what caused the problem, but a dodgy PayPal security upgrade was a possible culprit. Telsyte principle analyst Warren Chaisatien said the company has erroneously blocked BigPond IP addresses at random.

"The problem as I see it stems from PayPal's upgraded security, which has a glitch that is blocking IP addresses," Chaisatien said. "It would not be anything more complex than that, and certainly nothing malicious."

-With Darren Pauli