It’s 6.30pm Sunday evening and sellers are still telling us that they are having trouble accessing parts of the eBay site.
A common issue appears to be with eBay messages, although others tell us that they’ve been unable to perform refunds and some still can’t access their My eBay pages at all.
DownDetector has had a steady stream of reports yesterday evening and then again during the day. Unsurprisingly there weren’t so many reports during the night time as the glitch appears limited to the UK in general and England and Wales in particular, although we have heard from Scottish and Northern Irish sellers who are also impacted.
eBay were insistent last week that it’s an ISP issue and not an issue with the eBay site per se. This reminds me of a similar issue in 2014, however that glitch was fixed the day it first appeared. It’s unprecedented for an ongoing ISP issue to be impacting eBay’s services over an extended period of time which if not fixed by Monday will be entering it’s fourth day.
Four days of being unable to access eBay, pick pack and despatch items, perform refunds and answer eBay messages will undoubtedly be having a serious effect on those sellers unable to use eBay functions.
The only advice we’re able to offer is to try a network other than your normal broadband. A 4G mobile phone network (either using the eBay app on a mobile or tablet or tethering a computer to a mobile handset or using a broadband dongle may give you temporary access to get items shipped and messages answered.
We will of course add an update on Monday morning as soon as we have more information on the status of eBay access.
Monday Morning 11am Update
We’re certain that eBay are working feverishly to find the root cause of this issue, even if it does appear to be an ISP issue and not an inherent problem with the eBay site. However with the number of comments and emails we’re still receiving plus the hits on DownDetector it’s obvious that the issue is still there.
As previously advised, if at all possible try hooking a computer up to a mobile network if you can as then you should at least be able to get some basic shipping completed and answer messages. Alternatively you may find an employee who could work from home with an alternative ISP to process orders.
Finally PayPal appears to be unaffected so as a last resort use PayPal records for shipping.
45 Responses
Yep can’t even read my messages.
.
Been a bad day period, for getting on the www.
Have several times tried to no avail to get a connection, not only on ebay.
Tried rebooting router which seems to help for a small period, but then the problem come’s back.
At mo, alright, so going to do my orders, just in case it crashes again later…..
This webpage is not available
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
No problems here on VM, although eBay sales have stopped & a quick burst of 45 orders between 2pm & 4pm.
Weirdly a lot of those sales where for one-off items listed years ago or items that are now slow sellers which where our bread & butter sales 3 years ago, before the 2013 Selling Limits glitch which wiped out all our listings.
https://tamebaynew.wpengine.com/2013/03/ebay-error-wholesale-listing-cancellations.html
Been a few days now here for me also a BT user. I wanted to buy a few things over weekend and have just about given up/ Listings just time out or get therein the end butwith out pics. been on ebay since before vladuz and never seen it like this.
Complete farce. Can’t access messages or resolution centre. Now have an escalated case pending review and can’t even get in to see what is going on.
Strange how ebay blame BT but nothing of the problem is listed on BT’s status page. Sounds a bit like the paypal and ebay blaming each other nonsense in January to me…
Log on to the ebay.com or ebay.ie sites, you can access ALL areas of ebay normally.
Once again this is another example of ebay.co.uk being poorly managed especially the IT function.
I’m with BT, had problems on Friday, but been fine for me since about Friday Evening.
My eBay/Selling Manager (Standard not Pro) for viewing sales made along with normal searching have been fine so far today. Getting into messages is very hit and miss along with getting into certain parts on the “help and Contact” menu. Thankfully I keep my admin as far as possible out of eBay’s system and physically on my local PC’s for just this sort of event. I remember well the days of dialup and how unreliable it was. Though I’m only a small seller so I can use archaic ways of working. 🙂 I feel sorry for those large volume sellers for who this must be a nightmare to work through.
Absolutely no problems all weekend on any site other than ebay.co.uk.
That doesn’t say “it’s BT’s fault” to me.
ebay working for me now when it was not a day or two ago so maybe fixed?
This is a follow up email regarding the recent correspondence you had with us on the issue of accessing messages.
First of all, we again sincerely apologies for the inconvenience that has been caused to you as you arr not able to access eBay messages.. As discussed over chat I had escalated the details of this to the relevant department I can assure you that this is not causing any issue due to eBay’s side. Your account is not impacted due to site maintenance.
We have further checked that these issues are going on in BT internet connection . They have confirmed it .There is an ongoing issue with ISP end with BT internet connection due to which members are facing issues while trying to connect to eBay site. Below please find a link which confirms this information:
https://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/service_status/
I do understand your expectations and I hope it should be resolved as BT internet connection team is working on it. You can check the status for your particular area by the above link . Also if the issue is not resolved on your account then as a workaround you can send the message from your registered email address to the buyer and also you can contact them via phone. You can also checked the email address of buyers via selling manager pro.
I do appreciate the patience and understanding you’ve displayed during the time this issue stemmed. If you have any concerns or queries in the future, please feel free to get back to us.
Kind regards,
A S.
eBay Customer Support
We just soldier on and work round it just like any other ebay issue. just expect the minimum of help/understanding from ebay and you won’t be disappointed lol
Definitely seems to be a BT Broadband issue.
If i use my phone as a mobile hotspot for the same pc i can get to myebay and messages without any problem.
So, to me that is all the proof i need that BT is the problem and not ebay.
I still couldn’t access messages on eBay this morning. However I rebooted my computer and cleared the cache in my browser and I now have access to messages. So if you are still having problems, try that.
monday morning and still the same ebay does not work cannot get into my messeges keeps timing out
~
The downdetector graphic seems headed upwards again this morning. (Although the actual numbers are not that large).
We are having a separate issue at the moment… First thing this morning everything was fine. However since ~9:30 we cant access the backend active listings as ESET is reporting “HTML/Refresh.BC trojan” every time we open the page…
Anyone else having the same? – about to call ebay and report the issue as its a multi PC issue.
10.20am on Monday and still ebay is not working. Can not access my messages. Some ‘view order’ pages won’t load and others load intermittently.
On the plus side the seller dashboard won’t load either so at least I don’t have to worry about defects!
Am also with BT 🙁
I can connect to http://www.ebay.co.uk but not to ebay.co.uk. If I traceroute the IPs ebay.co.uk points to then I get sent to the US by Akamai (via Deutsche Telekeom). So I think it’s an Akamai routing problem.
I have just noticed this morning that eBay support 0800 number has been replaced with an 0345 number & call back option has been removed along with the subject “selling tools”
I’m with Sky & so far have not been affected by the outage. Based in London
Trying to reply to a returns request 10.48 Monday.
ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT
FML.
Had problems with messages yesterday but OK if accessed link in the ebay email – today’s problem which has just started is the same as stephen wright – can’t access ebay dispatch panel due to ESET stating there is a trojan horse – now not sure if it’s an ebay thing or a BT thing
Soething seriously wrong with this.
I’m not getting this on ANY other website, just eBay who are blaming BT.
Complete nonsense.
Definitely something wrong with Ebay-UK !!
Logged in via Ebay.com as suggested by others & managed to access my selling pages no problem. But layout & categories were different to UK version, so didn’t go any further – yet! Managed to reply to a message earlier today (7am) after failing last night, but now unable to access messages again.
Can do all my other on-line business as normal – just Ebay-uk making a pigs ear of it all. Bah-Humbug.
Has this effected anyone else’s sales at all? We’ve had eBay orders come through, but seeing as it’s been a payday weekend eBay sales have been pretty poor and we’ve not experienced the usual end of month sales spike. February is the worst month of the year sales wise as it is anyway, without something like this making it worse.
You can use a VPN too then it works fine, I’m using GOM which is a addon for chrome, I wish they would hurry up and fix this though its not ideal at all ! Its been happening since Friday morning
I’m in southern Ireland so how can it be and ISP issue? We have a completely different network here. And other sites like ebay.com and ebay.ie don’t work either with messages.
My stuff has all been fine at this time. However, I haev noticed that eBay.co.uk is probably the slowest website I regularly visit, in terms of page loading times. This is the case with my home broadband (Virgin), my mobile provider (Tesco, which I think is run by O2) and my workplace broadband (NHS – during my tea breaks only!). I wonder if this is a symptom of a more general malaise with the site?
At home I cannot send a message without it timing out and I have BT infinity on a BT line, but at the office I can send messages fine and on a BT broadband line but with 5G as a ISP… Definitely an ISP/Ebay connection issue so I hope they are both working together on resolving this…??
Cannot access messages I have been in contact with ebay and they are blaming BT any idea when they will sort?
Although eBay is blaming this is an ISP issue the issue is with servers in Germany. eBay are knowingly blaming ISP’s for their issue. A press release is expected soon.
…..message from bt technical today after i contacted them”Our investigations have found that this is unrelated to site blocking and that as a minimum, Virgin Media, BT and Plusnet customers are having issues with parts of the eBay site.
We are reaching out to eBay with some network trace evidence that shows the traffic appearing to be stopping on a server based in Germany. We’ve asked eBay that they ensure they stop their social media team continuing to tweet that it is a BT issue.”
eBay passing the buck? Surely not?
I suspect the official statement will read something like this – ” A small number of our customers blur blur blur”
Sales slowly coming through now Outage map still as red as a traffic light . 8pm 29th feb
If all the internet to your pc comes down the same bits of cable from BT, can someone explain to me how the bits from ebay are not getting through while every other website out there are having their bits get through.