According to reports, there were some eBay technical problems on Monday evening that were impacting the ability of both buyers and sellers to use the site for a period. It seems like the problems were affecting sellers in both Europe and North America, with users in the UK and the USA reporting the most problems.
The above image shows a heat map of the number of DownDetector reports that were coming from eBayers and their location and concentration. In a twist from recent outages, it’s notable that there were complaints from both sides of the Atlantic, so a UK ISP problem is unlikely to be to blame. DownDetector reports peaked at over 500, which isn’t huge, but their graph did show a significant spike in the late evening at circa 10pm GMT that seemed ongoing for a few hours.
As it stands, we have no way of assessing the size and nature of the problem, or how long it lasted, so if you did experience difficulties we’d be very interested to hear your detailed experience. Leave a comment below.
Predominantly, on Facebook and elsewhere, eBay UK sellers reported that they were having problems logging on to and using My eBay and the Seller Hub. But, perhaps owing to the reasonably late hour, there wasn’t a great volume of complaints. The message – “this service is unavailable” – was reportedly being displayed. Complaints from US merchants have been much more numerous than those from UK sellers.
An eBay staffer on the eBay.com discussion boards referred sellers to the System Status Board and, at one point, which deals with the US marketplace specifically, that showed that there were problems with bidding, Buy it Now, checkout, listing, and shipping label printing.
eBay technical problems are inevitable from time to time. And it does look this incident, as far as we can ascertain, was reasonably short lived and minor. Tell us if we’re wrong about that.
12 Responses
Ebay invoices not working properly – postage is being zeroed.
We packed up and went out. Thought it was our internet initially but quickly realised it was at eBay’s end. Never realised before that there is life OUTSIDE of eBay and it looks good!
I was trying to do some listing before the FVF £1 offer expired at midnight, but only managed to list half of my items as eBay was not working at all for quite some time. I feel cheated and hope they have another offer soon. I suppose an apology from them would be too much to hope for.
Still ongoing today – site is running very slow, between clicking “reply” on messages and the screen loading can be 5 minutes or more… Sales are down so we can only assume that the customers are having the same slow experience and deciding not to bother. I was trying to buy a few items myself last night – search pages loaded then you click an item to be told the item has been removed (incorrectly) so I couldn’t buy.
Unfortunately that means that the less tech-savvy customers may be blaming us as a company / brand rather than eBay issues as eBay remains quiet on all issues like this.
Message system is not working well at all. We had issues with seller hub also.
E-mail from Ebay last night, “Congratulations, your item is now sold”, shame I couldn’t actually log on and get any details about the customer!
Got to laugh, sales 50% down in the last 18hrs based on last fifty day average…. yet no comment from ebay
Steller customer service here ebay… I do not allocate time in my accounts and costs for time spent “tooling about as ebay was down”.. just how does one budget for it?
I budgeted correctly, planned for the weather disruption and advised over 600 customers of the same during last week… all happy bunny’s
To qualify for Top Rated Status, isnt it all about customer service….? well ebay?
The silence is deafening (again).. but lets not get carried way wanting to run a business and prosper…
I believe the problem is only at our end – the sellers end, seller hub, messages etc.
The outage doesn’t seem to have effected the buyers end so there should be no reduction in sales although it does make it a bit more difficult to get the orders out lol.
every time i try to log in on ebay it never lets me so they give you stupid numbers to put in and they never work i try to reset it all again over and over again which never works im getting fed up with it dont thinkim going to bother useing it again
That outage map is utterly pointless. The dark patches permanently show up in the same places.
The reason for this is that the patches correlate with the highest density of eBay users. Thus the patches permanently hover over densely populated areas such as the East and West coasts of the US and NW Europe.
The map never, ever, changes, so has no correlation to eBay outages, merely to eBay usage. I fear that some people hang onto it as an explanation of slow sales rather than something more fundamental such as people waiting for payday before they buy something.
What would be interesting would be if there was a large patch in the Sahara, or the middle of America. But there’s no point waiting to see it, because it never happens.
3,565 hits on downdetector at 10pm last night for Ebay UK and big spike on .com as well.
Ebay makes enough money to wipe their arses with banknotes, so why don’t they spend any of it on the site?