Respond to PayPal Web Traffic Suddenly Falling to Zero: Diagnosis and Incident Plan

You are a product manager at PayPal. Without warning, PayPal's web traffic drops by 100%: visits to its web properties are now at zero. What would you do? Walk through how you would confirm what is happening, find the cause and respond, including whom you would involve and when. ```hint What can produce an exact zero Real user behavior rarely takes a large site's traffic all the way to zero in an instant. Before building a long list of causes, think about which kinds of events could, and which quick checks would tell those kinds apart. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which web surfaces does "web traffic" cover here: the consumer website and account pages, the checkout flows that open from merchant sites, or every web property of PayPal's brands? - How is traffic measured: client-side analytics events, server or load-balancer request logs, or CDN logs? - Is the drop the same in every country, browser and device type, and is traffic in the mobile apps normal? - Do I own this metric and the product area, or am I a PM who spotted the drop on a shared dashboard? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Recognizing that a drop to exactly zero points to a broken measurement pipeline or a total outage, and using independent data sources to tell which - A fast, ordered diagnosis: confirm the data, check whether the site is reachable, segment the drop, then review recent internal changes before external causes - Urgency suited to a payments business, including the effect on consumers and on merchants whose checkout depends on PayPal - The PM's role in the incident: escalation, impact assessment, decisions and communication with internal teams, merchants and users - Follow-through after recovery: verifying the fix, repairing the data, a blameless postmortem and monitoring that would catch the problem sooner ### Follow-up Questions - Server logs and payment volume look normal, and only the analytics dashboard shows zero. What do you do next, and who needs to know? - Traffic is genuinely zero, but only in one country. Which causes move to the top of your list, and how does your response change? - What alerting would you put in place so the team learns about a total drop within minutes instead of from a dashboard?