One thing I completely abhor about the digital age is that all it takes is one disgruntled "tech user" to come up with a rumor and pass it off as fact. I woke up this morning with a lot of chatter among the Filipino freelancing community that PayPal has "officially" ended its business relationship with GCash. According to the rumor, PayPal got tired of the hundreds of complaints it kept on getting from GCash users. So they had to pull the plug.
So I did a little bit of digging. Nope, there's no official announcement that PayPal has indeed severed its relationship with GCash. All I know is that during the last several days, a lot of people have been encountering problems when they attempt to transfer their PayPal funds to their GCash accounts. People had been unable to use the service for days. When asked what's going on, Globe's customer support representatives usually parrot the following answer: "GCash transactions are temporarily unavailable due to emergency maintenance".
Some support representatives went as far as saying that the downtime will only be until February 20. Well, it's already February 21 and the service is still unavailable.
The bottom line here is that GCash is unavailable right now. It has been unavailable for days now. But that doesn't mean the service's partnership with PayPal is over. I say it again, there's no official announcement of the severance. As of now, that's just a rumor.
Here's a copy of a reply of one of GCash's support representatives when asked what's going on: "We're sorry but PayPal to GCash is currently under maintenance until Tuesday. Rest assured that it will be up the next day. Apologies for the inconvenience."