IPN postback - PayPal servers started returning 403 errors

[vorwrath]

For the last 4 days, I've noticed PayPal's servers sometimes returning "403 - Forbidden" errors in response to IPN verification postbacks. This seems to be happening in about 30% of cases, seemingly at random. In other cases it works fine. I first observed this on 30 August. My app had been working fine for a very long time before that, and there were no recent changes on my side, so I suspect this to be a PayPal problem.

It's only when we do a postback to validate IPNs that I've noticed an issue, the initial IPNs seem to be coming through as expected.

Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour starting recently?

[Temp20220903H]

Yes, I'm getting the same thing. It's driving me mad, and is probably the final straw that gets me to drop all PayPal support on my site. This is ridiculous.

[cms-esg]

Yeah we are having the same issue on Sept 7.

Did you find a solution to the problem?  We are using django-paypal and this has started happening just lately.

[vorwrath]

I had one possible idea (I'm also using django-paypal, so I guess we probably have the same problem). I noticed that PayPal changed their recommended IPN postback URL at some point, and that was modified in django-paypal 1.1 to be a URL under ipnpb.paypal.com instead of www.paypal.com. If the unreliability is only affecting the old URL and not the new one, maybe that's why more people haven't reported it.

I've updated from django-paypal 1.0 to 2.0 so that the newer postback URL will be used, but have only just done that now, so it's too early to know whether it makes any difference. I'll post back with my findings in a few days.

If that doesn't fix it, then I'm out of ideas and will probably look at other payment options.

[vorwrath]

I haven't observed any errors since switching to the newer endpoint (as described in my previous post), so that's probably worth a try if you're seeing this problem.

No idea why the previous endpoint worked fine for years but is suddenly horrendously unstable though!

[statk192]

Has this issue being worked on or was there an announcement? We were using the new endpoint (ipnpb.paypal.com) and had the same issue in this exact timeframe.

[statk192]

We were affected by this issue and have no idea whether it was a server issue or implementation on our end. Should at the very least be a communication?