Nov 23, 2009

Outage on eBay crippled weekend shopping

Online auction giant eBay apologized for a daylong glitch that inactivated the search function on its Web site.

Shopping on eBay came to a screeching halt over the weekend as the site experienced technical issues that prevented users from finding listings through the search and browse functions.


eBay said the problem resulted from a surge in live listings as sellers ramped up for the holiday season.

In response to most eBay search requests over the weekend buyers saw the following screen:

The eBay Announcement Board had this message:

Due to errors in some of our backend systems, members may be seeing different errors in Search. This could be that "We were unable to run the search results you entered. Please try again in a few minutes" or a blank page, or simply the browser being unable to display the page. Please note that we are working as quickly as possible to get this resolved. Thank you for your patience as we continue to work to resolve this.

The auction giant said it would compensate sellers for their losses. In the past eBay has compensated sellers by extending their auction listings at no additional cost - there is never a cash compensation to sellers as a result of a glitch on eBay.

By the way, in case you wondered why you or your friends are having a more difficult time getting bids on your eBay auctions, it may be because eBay has 200,000,000 live listings which is 33 percent more than at this time one year ago.

Also, over the past year, eBay has rolled out a special ‘on-ramp’ for large retailers, manufacturers and liquidators called Large Merchant Services APIs flooding eBay with new auctions.

More here.