It’s one way to celebrate your 19th Birthday (yes, eBay is 19 today).
At a conservative estimate, from what we’ve observed, the vast majority of eBay users (buyers and sellers) were not able to login to eBay this evening for approximately 4 hours. That meant sellers couldn’t go about their business and buyers could not part with their money.
This was a repeat of an incident earlier in the day which saw buyers and sellers experience similar difficulties using the marketplace. However, on that occasion (I suspect because it was the middle of the night stateside) we didn’t see such a backlash and brouhaha. We reported that problem this morning here.
As I write (22:45 BST), it seems that people can login again and undertake some functions. But we at Tamebay still can’t see vital information in My eBay. eBay have been in touch to say the issue is resolved. Do you agree?
Statement from eBay at 20:30 BST: “Today, some eBay users are experiencing issues when signing in to the site. Based on our initial investigation, this appears to be the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled server maintenance.
It is only impacting a portion of our users; most eBay users are unaffected. We’re working to resolve this issue quickly and will continue to keep our customers updated. We apologise for any inconvenience to our users.”
Clearly, judging from Twitter, this affected users all over the world. And according to some of the emails we’re receiving, it’s still happening, and from our own testing it’s still not 100% resolved. Let us know your experiences.
Perhaps, even in 2014, we should expect even top websites such as eBay to suffer widespread glitches and problems like this on occasion. But what I do know is that in 2014, the communication plan that eBay employed is neither acceptable or successful. They need to talk and reassure people from the earliest moment: on Twitter, on Facebook, in public. That they didn’t is pretty reprehensible.
Updated, Thursday 4th September 2014 15:00 BST. eBay have given us this comment:
“While many users were unaffected, we know any interruption for our users is frustrating. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused the buyers or sellers involved. We will credit sellers for fees related to listings affected by this and make sure their seller rating is not impacted by defects or the inability to upload tracking or print shipping labels. Affected sellers will be contacted by email in the coming days.
We understand the high expectations our community has for our platform. We’re working now to put safeguards in place to help ensure this issue doesn’t happen again.”
45 Responses
Still down for me as of 11pm,
Can’t leave feedback or see my sales for today, only email confirmation of what has sold,
Lost about 50% of sales I normally get for a Wednesday,
Only shows error message,
MyEbay.BIZ.QUERY_UNKOWN_ERROR
Currently Ebay won’t recognise my user name or password and when I try the ‘forgot password’ link it tells me that my registration process needs completing (I’ve been registered for 14 years).
And yet from the same IP address my daughter’s Ebay account can be logged into.
So have the hackers been selective with accounts??
Still down at 8.06am EST Australia
My feedback is now up the creak, I’ve 0 ratings for all areas. It thinks I’m a new seller with no fb. This might ding me if I try to list under there free listing tomorrow!
Been down since 17:00GMT,
At the least ebay should have emailed effected members to let them know, I’ve had no comms from ebay and couldn’t contact them when I tried. Considering the amount ebay makes from it’s sellers this is completely unacceptable. It’s time to start talking compensation, and not some pitiful free listings day!
Sellers are treated like absolute s…. by Ebay. where are the updates ? Why the lies ? absolutely disgusting
We are still unable to respond to any messages via eBay’s interface (this has been going on for several hours) – responding by email reply to the messages appears to work in some instances. 23:25 UK time. Lancashire.
Faulty site, poor communication. You’d think after so many occasions they might have worked out how to get it right when things go wrong. I can’t wait for the patronising apologetic email with some pointless token offer.
Unfortunately, even the die hard supporters (like me) run out of patience eventually.
As most 19 year olds get told at some point, it’s time to stop acting like a teenager and get your act together.
It’s been down from 5:30pm for me, still not back at midnight (UK).
I cannot log into my account, it says the password is incorrect.
More worrying is when searching for my items, they are still showing but when I click on them it tells me they are no longer available for sale. I guess all my watchers/potential buyers are being told the same.
It’s 12.24 am on Thursday 4th. I logged on to see my purchase history (to chase some things) and could not bring up the page – simply got the message ‘Sorry, we couldn’t complete your request. Try again later.’
I can’t list anything new. I get a red message at the top of the last page saying.
“You can’t submit your listing due to the following problems
•Please enter a valid value.
• An error has occurred
Go back and edit my listing”
At the bottom of the page a yellow banner appears saying.
“do you want to open or save V4Ajax from [email protected] ”
What is that about?
Been trying to login since 1900hrs. Its now 0130 and still cant!
Yes, I saw the current problem on facebook and wondered if it were a blip or media hyped issue.
Couldn’t see any issues with my account (other than poor sales for the day, but that’s “normal” now).
Tried to list.
Failed.
Came here to read and post about it.
Australia here eBay went down at 5pm last night 3rd Sept and was totally down from 6am to 9.45am this morning. There should be a system within eBay that sends messages to members eMail addresses to warn them of problems, so many Aussie sellers were on Facebook asking questions as they thought it was there computers etc or that there eBay account may have been hacked as when they tried to login it kept saying incorrect password. The problem apparently has hit USA and Australia, not sure where is in the world
After giving it all a break, logged in normally (UK) at around 2.30 am BST (Chris/Dan you still seem to be on GMT?).
All listings and data appear to be in good shape but no sales since yesterday 16.42 BST. I have, as I write this, just been paid for an order invoiced 2 days ago.
If this event has truly left ‘most users unaffected’ it is strange that you have not heard from any of them.
Sadly all to often it seems that the eBay machine engages in disingenuous spin.
I think there’s something seriously wrong with ebay. Constant glitches this year, particularly since the hacking earlier in the year.
We are paying for a service that is not delivering!
This doesn’t really effect me as my sales on ebay are ruddy awful anyway.
There always seems to be some hitch, had a devil of a job uploading additional photos the other day for instance.
Time for a concerted push from Ebayers for proper compensation for lost sales
Give us our money back, Ebay!
Noticed the problem around 1PM BST Wednesday . . . “some of our users” says eBay? Don’t think so! Together with my partner we have FIVE eBay identities and ALL were unable to be accessed until around midnight, even then large parts of the “My eBay” were flagged up in red as unavailable.
Just checked this morning and all seems OK on all our user-names but this had to be huge and global and there will be a lot of disappointed potential buyers who failed to make that final bid . . . and therefore many, many sellers who have “sold short”?
Last night I could not log into my seller account on ebay.co.uk but was able to log into it on eBay.com At the time I looked on downdetector I noticed the outage map said eBay was down in most of UK & a large chunk of europe. You can still see the outage spike here
https://downdetector.co.uk/problems/ebay
Has anyone read this here. Could this be part of the current outage?
https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Community-Board-Chats/ebay-crashes-will-continue-for-some-time/m-p/3629475#M413
Here’s what was said a few weeks back
It looks like the crash that affected ebay and other sites such as Amazon was actually due to the internet routing tables exceeding a limit of 512,000 entries which affects older routers used by ISPs and other commercial organisations. The limit has been reached as smaller and smaller blocks of IPv4 addresses are handed out – this requires more routes to be maintained and will result in regular breaches of the 512,000 limit going forwards until all of the older equipment is replaced or fixed which will likely take some time.
Sold 4 items overnight instead of the usual 15-20, nothing from outside EU, 3 in UK, 1 in NL.
This is lost profit and cost recovery.
My view has been for some time ebay have created a monster they do not have the capability to manage or maintain. There are problems throughout the org from technical to business practice.
And yet they keep changing and adding new requirements, making it ever more complex, and the situation worse.
Ebay should be forgetting more and more changes and concentrate on making the platform more robust and simpler.
If there was any kind of regulatory body overseeing e-commerce they would have been significantly fined and be at the bottom of any customer satisfaction rating.
/.
No Emails this morning for favourite search items…..
I STILL can’t list anything new. It’s been at least 12 hours now.
Not Funny had about 8 items on auction paid out 35p for each auction listing for Ebay to fail me yet again 2 sales & no recent bidding activity suspect no one could make a bid total sales less than a tenner costs & listing fees = not worth the hassle any more last time I ever pay a listing fee, also found it funny (not) at work a colleague could not make a bid on some games he was watching asked me & I looked dumnfounded thinking he was some kind of an idiot something so simple Ebay !!!
We have had problems at times, but for the first time in 8 months we have been selling more than we have in the past 8 months, nothing compared to sale before summer last year, and nothing compared to Amazon, but sales up on eBay by 30% Very odd.
Has anyone had problems with ebay changing their estimated dispatch time? A number of my listings suddenly say 5 working days when I’m sure Ive always put 2 working days. Also, a number of my first clas recorded options have changed to 2nd class recorded. What is going on!?
Only had one sale yesterday – can’t post on the discussion boards – we have a technical problem – this has been ongoing since the outage and is still a problem now, Can’t sign in to the discussion boards or access the powerseller board
All tonight’s auctions ended prematurely at 2pm this afternoon instead of 9pm.
What’s going on Ebay, you muppets.
Well all seems well now, but does anyone else notice that someties ebay is really sugglish to use?
Paypal down? anyone else having trouble this afternoon/tonight, i keep getting “Internal Server Error”. also couple of buyers saying they can’t pay as paypal not working properly. All we need eh?