yeah, I agree, but I think a lot of us work in similar situations, where bug tracking exists, but there's such inundation of bugs that we can lose track of some.

I guess I have sympathy for the PayPal team in this case. They're working on an extremely large product, with a huge user-base. I would imagine it would be very easy for bugs like this to fall through the cracks even with a "process" in place

That assumes that the manager doesn't insist that bugs of age get closed simply because long-open bugs make for ugly metrics.