Good lord, why are all my services going down?

I have been trying to create a sandbox account with a fake buyer and seller account for a particular project I am working on so as to test the PayPal Payments Pro API integration. I have been trying to create this sandbox account for several days now and it’s basically not working. Here’s what happens:

1) From within the PayPal Sandbox Developer Environment
- Click “Test Accounts” tab
- Click “Create test account” link
- (keep default values) Click “Create Account” button and…

Sorry, an error has occurred

ConnectionManagerError: Cannot connect to 1:10.6.192.92:30913 (unknown user). Gave up after 1 try. Backtrace: aea6b89 aea6b19 ae838ba aec5ce7 aec9904 aec823d adb4c78 ba72469 b751eb1 bb782a7 b635029 b621ba6 b660fa3 8aba77a 8abc08b a05a8f2 9fea067 9fe92dd 807a299 80acbd5 808efac 805fe57 40d819cb 805f8e1

…???

The funny part is that when you hit the back button and click the “Test Accounts” tab again - the account who’s creation just caused the error above is shown. The problem here is that creating a test business account should automatically provide you with the necessary fake API credentials for testing but the account shows UNVERIFIED after the error.

On the developer forum, the tech said to login to fake PayPal and verify your email by having fake PayPal email a fake email verification to my sandbox PayPal’s fake business account’s fake email. When I get the email - I follow the instructions to verify the email in fake PayPal but when I go back to sandbox PayPal, the account is still !@$@%$ UNVERIFIED.

This sandbox thing is necessary but I don’t have a clue what’s going on over there sometimes. Not to mention the whole site looks broken and unprofessional which leads me to believe they’re not investing much in it.

Strange though as core to their service as it is.

If anyone else is having problems with this or has figured this problem out already, please comment so I can finish this project for the love of god.

… ok I found the answer [10 seconds later] - in order to create an account WITHOUT generating an error EVERY time, you must click the “Show Advanced Options” link to show the advanced options drop down. You must then click the “No” radio button next to “Confirm Email” and then click the “Create Account” button. Your new accounts show up VERIFIED.

I know don’t even get me started it’s so idiotic I can’t believe it.

Update:
8/27 @ 2:48am EST: Found a new problem -> found this response on from a PayPal tech:

“The sandbox is currently down. The engineering staff is working on getting the problem resolved.”

…which was dated 8/16 ??