eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is having an issue which may have just cost sellers millions and millions of dollars in untold profits today. After doing random searches today on Christmas present purchases and with eBay being one of the online destinations, it was suddenly clear that something was wrong on eBay. The system was not working if you did not already have your item numbers known. Search functions yielded nothing and stores were out. If this were to happen after midnight on a Tuesday, it might not matter. But this outage is on a weekend day when so many buyers and sellers aren’t at work and are able to spend the effort to go eBaying.
A technical support chat only yielded “Due to the great number of visitors currently using the system, your request cannot currently be dealt with. Please try again later.”
A call into support just has the message “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with search and the ability to access stores….”
Whether this lasts or not is unknown, but even the most common searched words yield “0 results found for _____” and “We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.”
The reality is that this does happen from time to time on the web. But when you see how the entire system is down for search and for stores, it is just proof that there are not enough redundancies. Or worse.
JON C. OGG
November 21, 2009
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