What’s Wrong with eBay?

Are you wondering what's wrong with eBay today?  So was I.  I knew something was up when I tried to look up some old Elvis memorabilia and eBay returned a big fat goose egg.  Next I tried "vintage" and got zero results.  It seems that eBay is experiencing some technical difficulties today (November 21).  This is a pretty big eBay outage.  I do not know specific numbers, but the amount of money being lost by eBay has got to be considerable.

A little bit of research showed that people have been tweeting and posting on message boards since this morning about this.  eBay seems to be having a bit of an outage.  This actually got me to realize that I've been fortunate enough to have never had the system go down when I had auctions running, and I've run thousands of them.  This is pretty unusual.

I have no doubt that there will be an explanation released as soon as things are fixed, but this really stinks for people who had auctions ending or who had an interest in bidding on something.  Of course no one has more motivation to get things up and running ASAP than eBay itself.  Every minute down is lost money and upset customers.

eBay's system announcement board has a statement about the outage and blames it on some errors on their backend systems.  They offer the following workaround options that you can try:

You can use the advanced search at the top of the page for your search.  You have to click the title and description box and you should get your results.  They also say that you can click the Buy it Now tab (or re-run the search using the title and description box) if you get a zero results page.

Finally, they give assurance that they are working as fast as they possibly can to get things fixed.

Personally, I'm cutting them some slack because, like I said, they have been remarkably consistent when I've run auctions.  As for the people who had listings ending today, I don't know if they will be quite as calm about the situation.

If you are one of the many people who will be affected by this major outage, you might want to check out eBay's policy on outages.

The timing of this is unbelievably bad.  Holiday shopping is just kicking into gear.  Because of this, many eBay sellers have started to really load up the auctions.  Of course they want them to end when the most people will be around to see them, so they end them on weekends.  There you go.  Double whammy.  Hopefully eBay will get this outage fixed soon.