eBay experiences third day of trouble - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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eBay experiences third day of trouble

By Troy Wolverton, Special to ZDNet
April 10, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/eBay-experiences-third-day-of-trouble/0,139023166,120264504,00.htm

eBay has had Web site problems for a third consecutive day, with some members having difficulty logging in to their personalised "My eBay pages," the company confirmed.

"The issue has been identified and all access restored," the company said in its note.

It was not known if the problems were related to other problems on Sunday and Monday. Further information was not available on the message boards, and eBay representatives did not return calls seeking comment.

On Sunday, customers were unable to view, bid or list items in eBay's clothing or jewellery areas for more than nine hours. On Monday, people reported that they couldn't access eBay's home page for more than an hour, and some sellers complained that their auctions had mysteriously disappeared from the Web site.

Last month, eBay suffered a 90-minute outage that affected customers' ability to reach its home page and some other pages. Later in the month, a site slowdown affected eBay users' ability to reach the site for nearly three hours.

In a note posted on its announcements board Monday, eBay acknowledged the ongoing problems and said it would send e-mail to those affected, detailing the problems and the steps it was taking to solve them. The company did not say what those problems or solutions were, saying only that they resulted in "specific issues" for different customers.

"We realise that this has been an inconvenience for our members, and we sincerely apologise," the company said in its note. "Please be patient with us as we send these e-mails, which we hope will answer your questions."

eBay has been continually upgrading its system since a round of multi-hour outages in 1999. The company first installed a backup system, then proceeded to move its database to a distributed architecture, with different portions of its site hosted on different servers instead of all on the same server. By distributing its systems, eBay has been able to limit the spread of problems from one area of its site to the entire site.

The company is currently engaged in its "V3" upgrade, which will include real-time updates of its data and minute-by-minute updates for listings. Listings are now updated about once every hour. The company has said the upgrade was not responsible for last month's outage.