Error message: An error with your payment paypal on your store

[JoanHall]

I'm using VirtueMart 2.6.12.2.  Everything has been working fine for as long as I've had it, until today.

I have had 3 sales today, and with each one, I received two emails that said:
     Hello,

     An error with your payment paypal on your store ChoirParts.com. The details are logged in the file http://choirparts.com/administrator/index.php?0ption=com_virtuemart&view=log&task=edit&logfile=paypal.1.log.php

     The VirtueMart Team

The logfile says the following:
   
    #
    #
    2015-06-04 22:17:33 ERROR validateIpnContent: Invalid IPN validation: NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL
    2015-09-04 19:01:42 ERROR validateIpnContent: Error while posting IPN: Connection refused, 111
    2015-09-04 19:29:41 ERROR validateIpnContent: Error while posting IPN: Connection refused, 111
    2015-09-04 22:53:50 ERROR validateIpnContent: Error while posting IPN: Connection refused, 111

When I go to PayPal, the transactions are successfully completed.  In Virtuemart, the orders all showed as Pending (I manually changed the order statuses to Completed so the customers could get their products).

Yesterday I had sales and everything was working fine as it always has.  Today all of my sales have had this problem.  I have not made any changes to my website.

HELP!!

[JoanHall]

UPDATE:  I talked to PayPal and they're saying that "connection refused" sounds like something is going wrong on THEIR side.  They're passing it on to their developers and they'll get back with me.

In the meantime, I watching attentively for every purchase and changing the order statuses myself.