Outages hamper eBay for second day
update Site problems continue to plague the company, one day after it suffered an outage to a portion of its site that lasted more than nine hours.
On Monday afternoon, eBay sellers reported that some of their auctions weren't listed in eBay's search system and some had disappeared from eBay's site altogether. eBay acknowledged the problem with the disappearing auctions on its announcements board.
"We are working to correct this situation and to determine the best course of action for those involved in these transactions," the company said in its note. "We appreciate your patience during this time and will post more information as it becomes available."
The company did not give more details about the problem and eBay representatives did not return calls seeking comment.
Earlier on Monday, eBay users reported problems accessing the company's home page. In an earlier note to customers, the auction giant said that some of its pages were "intermittently unavailable" between 9:40 a.m. PDT and 10:48 a.m. PDT.
"We have identified the source of the issue, and restored full access to all pages," the company said in another note on a system status board. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you."
For more than nine hours on Sunday, eBay customers could not view or bid on items in the company's jewelry or clothing areas. Additionally, sellers couldn't list items in those categories during the outage.
eBay suffered a nearly 11-hour outage in January 2001 when its primary and backup systems failed because of the company's decision to delay replacing some of its hardware. The site had been relatively stable since then.
But in recent months, the company has seen an upsurge in problems. Last month, eBay suffered a 90-minute outage that affected customers' ability to reach its home page and other "static" pages. Later in the month, a site slowdown affected eBay users' ability to reach the site for nearly three hours.
San Jose, Calif.-based eBay is upgrading its back-end systems with its "V3" initiative, which will include real-time updates for its data warehouse and minute-by-minute updates for listings. Listings are now updated once per hour. The company has said the upgrade was not responsible for last month's outage.
A woman who sells high-end women's clothing on eBay said that some of her listings had been affected by Sunday's outage and they still weren't showing up Monday afternoon.
"It's frustrating," said Carol, who asked that her last name not be used. "I understand there's going to be blips now and then. But (eBay is) not managing expectations."