On the Friday before a Bank Holiday Dan and I thought it would be pretty quiet and safe to both attend a meeting. Not only that but neither of us took our laptops with us.
How wrong were we, we were bombarded with emails and phone calls from many of you who were unable to log into eBay today for several hours when planned maintenance overran.
eBay put up a notice when the maintenance which should have finished at 9am was still causing ongoing problems at 11:45 and at “We are sorry for the issues which affected eBay access earlier today. The problems have significantly reduced, and our focus is on resolving the situation“.
Not what you’d want the Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend when many people were probably hoping to slope off early and understandably frustrating.
We did get a phone call from eBay to let us know of the ongoing problems and sorry we were out of the office and couldn’t post an update, but in truth we didn’t really have anything to add other than that eBay wasn’t working and we didn’t have an ETA for when it would be fixed.
Hopefully everyone has packed up now and are set to enjoy a well earned break over the Bank Holiday before we’re all back to work on Tuesday.
23:34hrs Edited to add: Statement from eBay
We have received the following additional statement from eBay:
Several eBay sites and customer service platforms around the world experienced intermittent outages between 11:45 pm (PST) on August 22nd to 6:00 am (PST) on August 23rd. This was the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled maintenance.
We’ve resolved the core technical issues and all eBay sites and customer service functions are up and running again with near 100% functionality. We are now working to put in safeguards to prevent this issue from happening again. At no point during this incident was any personal information at risk.
Our top priority is delivering the best experience to our buyers and sellers. We understand the high expectations our community has for our platform, and we sincerely regret that we did not live up to some of those expectations last night.
To the extent sellers were impacted by this, they should know that they are covered by the protections in our site outage policy, which can be found at . We will provide those sellers with additional information regarding applicable credits in the coming days.
We’ll wait to see how eBay classify the outage which will determine which part of the outage policy applies.
15 Responses
It is still FUBAR in many ways for many people.
Lost sales, no/low bid auction finishes, buyers unable to bid/buy, sellers unable to update/re-list/list, GTCs not relisting, discussion boards still down – the list goes on.
You should know better than to think sellers pack up and take 3 days off over a BH weekend!
I still can’t list anything, been trying on and off since 8am.
I should’ve spent the day working on my website!
Only two sales too, not good for a potentially busy weekend 🙁
We use ebay’s File Exchange to list items. It’s been down all day and is still knackered.
No mention of File Exchange problems from ebay, the discussion boards ain’t working – even the dedicated board on their USA site.
We’re wondering, at 8.48 pm, why the hell we pay eBay £600+ fees per month.
Very frustrating day today — not knowing if it would be fixed quickly, we delayed dispatch operations until just before lunch and then manually processed everything — even down to printing out hand-typed labels for some customers.
Very proud of the team for completing all dispatch within our one day handling time (even if ongoing technical issues with Business Policies mean that we can’t flag our listings as “Get It Fast”).
Hoping for a rainy weekend for all – let’s get those sales back up! 😉
Brilliant, utterly ruined day, we couldn’t even print any picking lists today.
They are clueless sometimes.
When ebay goes down, my chief of staff logs in on PayPal and opens each payment from approx last unshipped ebay sale in new tab and prints. Yes it is horrible when there is over 60 orders and thus 67 a4 paper but at least him and the team can then pick each order prep packing.
Like I say to him, “eBay SMP is down, nothing we can do, deal with it and press on to get this done”
Always work positive.
Big time
Latest .com announcement:
https://announcements.ebay.com/2013/08/a-message-regarding-last-nights-site-outage/
‘From 11:45 pm PST on August 22 through 6:00 am PST on August 23, several eBay sites and customer service platforms around the world experienced intermittent outages. These outages were the result of technical issues which occurred during regularly scheduled maintenance.
We’ve resolved the core technical issues and all eBay sites and customer service functions are up and running again, with near 100% functionality. We are now working to build additional safeguards into the maintenance process to prevent this from happening again.
Know that at no point during this incident was any personal information at risk.
Sellers that were impacted by this outage are covered by the protections in our site outage policy. We will provide impacted sellers with additional information regarding applicable credits in the coming days.
Our top priority is to deliver the best experience to our buyers and sellers. We understand the high expectations our community has for our platform, and we sincerely regret that we did not live up to some of those expectations last night.
As always, thank you for being a part of the eBay community.’
It’s worth noting that there was some functionality when we logged in via both the US and The AUS sites. At least we could see what was happening to some degree and print off all order for today.
We could do no additional work and it was pretty poor that the customer support simply gave no info and practically shut down. I think ebay tech management in charge should be disciplined/fired and ebay to make a freebie promotion to make up for the farce – that would be a meaningful sorry to us.
eBay’s File Exchange is still knackered Saturday morning at 6am. No word from eBay on announcement / discussion boards about these problems.
Anyone else having aggro with this?
I’m still having problems this morning – Cannot open case via resolution centre, cannot start/schedule sales on items via ‘Markdown manager’ and cannot log into the ebay community forums. Those are just the problems I have found so far…
Anyone else had problems in the run up to this public announcement? We have been trying to list all week and its been so slow that its painful and when it was not super slow it errored out. Its not our internet as other sites like Amazon work just fine.
There is a thread on the PSB reporting SNAFU in .com search results.
I checked my own listings which comfirmed that ‘post free’ UK listings are showing as ‘Free Shipping’ in .com searches. All my listings have an International Shipping charge
The items do show the correct shipping charge on the view item page but the opportunity to upset buyers and potential buyers is very worrying.
eBay really should be doing better.