It's certainly not generally down for everyone. I've not seen any oddities in IPN for a few years, and can confirm notifications have gone through over the past few days.
It's important to be careful about jumping to drastic conclusions when debugging a connection like this.
E.g., from the OP:
> I called Paypal Technical Support to verify exactly what we were seeing. Sure enough, they had received other calls today about this exact issue. Other vendors were not receiving IPNs for their orders. The ticket for this "critical bug" was created today.
> The problem with that fact is that our customer's order was from 9 days ago. For at least 9 days (we are going through all of our partial orders now to see the full extent of this bug), Paypal was not sending IPNs to merchants and did not know.
This doesn't actually follow logically. The tech support rep mentioned getting other calls about IPNs not going through does not mean NO other IPNs were going through. Likewise, if Tindie has actually not gotten any IPNs for 9 days, that doesn't indicate anything about the other millions of PayPal merchants.
This reminds me a bit of customers who call in a panic that "your entire website is broken!", and after a bit of discussion it becomes clear that their internet connection is down.
The same stream of events could be caused by lots of things, including minor configuration changes on Tindie's end.
It's important to be careful about jumping to drastic conclusions when debugging a connection like this.
E.g., from the OP:
> I called Paypal Technical Support to verify exactly what we were seeing. Sure enough, they had received other calls today about this exact issue. Other vendors were not receiving IPNs for their orders. The ticket for this "critical bug" was created today.
> The problem with that fact is that our customer's order was from 9 days ago. For at least 9 days (we are going through all of our partial orders now to see the full extent of this bug), Paypal was not sending IPNs to merchants and did not know.
This doesn't actually follow logically. The tech support rep mentioned getting other calls about IPNs not going through does not mean NO other IPNs were going through. Likewise, if Tindie has actually not gotten any IPNs for 9 days, that doesn't indicate anything about the other millions of PayPal merchants.
This reminds me a bit of customers who call in a panic that "your entire website is broken!", and after a bit of discussion it becomes clear that their internet connection is down.
The same stream of events could be caused by lots of things, including minor configuration changes on Tindie's end.