First off, I'm sorry I didn't post here earlier about Saturday's eBay outages. I did post something over on my personal blog as soon as I noticed, but frankly I expected the problem to be resolved in quick order.
Nope. While you can at least do some shopping right now, eBay is certainly not back at full strength as of 1:20 am early Sunday morning. For example, my eBay store should currently be showing 4,264 items (according to My eBay which appears to have an accurate count of what should be active), but it's only displaying 3,624 (though just before publishing this piece all items appeared to be back).
If you're a seller on eBay, you're probably already aware of the outage. My concern is the buyers. Now not to quibble over whether they're eBay's buyers or my buyers, but either way unless they're savvy enough to know about the Systems Announcements Board they're either going to think I'm not offering all I can or that eBay itself isn't--and earlier this afternoon they would have found 0 items in stock across all of eBay.
eBay should have posted an announcement about this outage on the home page of the site as we've seen Amazon.com do in the past. But they didn't, so you know what, that's why I'm put in the position where I open this article by apologizing to you--I thought the problem would be gone by the time I got around to it. eBay does that reasoning sound familiar?
Here are some other places you can read about all of today's eBay drama:
Not the earliest post by far, but the most official on the eBay Ink blog from Richard Brewer-Hay.
Ina Steiner at AuctionBytes has been updating the incident as new information makes itself available.
ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo takes a look at likely causes and possible impacts over on his eBay Strategies blog.
Sue Bailey of Tamebay lets us know the problem has found its way to eBay UK.
Finally, John Lawson of the ColderICE blog gives us some screenshots showing what you might have missed earlier. Shopping on eBay, well, here are a bunch of third party ads to take you off the site.
Comments
Knowing Ebay, what happened yesterday was probably the result of their constant tinkering and manipulating search. I agree with you about the buyers...it is of the utmost importance to sellers and Ebay (whether they realize it or not) to have the site up and running smoothly! Sales are the bottom line...a line that Ebay forgets in its relentless search for the quick buck! Ebay also doesn't realize buyers have a great variety of choices now...Ebay is NOT the only game in town and they need to stop acting like it - sharpen up and work WITH the sellers.
news reports indicate ebay's search function is back up. absolutely not so - as of 1 p.m.
eBay managements "listing surge" excuse simply does not hold water.
At best the explanation is simply the tip of the iceberg. Look below the surface and the root cause of the system wide outage becomes apparent.
If the 'listing surge' had anything to do with bringing eBay down, it was not because of the volume of listings, it was because eBay had been tinkering with search for the previous two weeks.
eBay had been tinkering with Best Match as well as changing code to take eBay stores back out of search. Additionally, eBay added code to display similar items on sellers listing pages, making yet another major change out of cycle. These code tweaks likely caused the search function to become unstable, so when listing volume grew, the system collapsed.
Thus, the cause was not a surge in listings, the cause of the collapse was incompetent management forcing system changes to be implemented on the fly without regard for the havoc those changes would have on the stability of the s
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