Sellers were unable to complete basic selling tasks on eBay on Wednesday morning as the site experienced the third outage in the past month. Things ground to a halt in the early morning hours the day before Thanksgiving – with some users unable to even log on to the site.
This time, eBay blamed the issue on a domain change. It apologized to users for the outage and said it would protect sellers who were impacted.
“We know that a number of sellers were impacted by Wednesday’s site issue, and we want to both apologize for this unanticipated interruption in service and let you know that affected sellers will be protected – no action required on your part. These difficulties – which are now resolved – occurred as a result of a public internet domain change that had an unanticipated impact on processing inside the eBay platform.”
While eBay is never the most stable of platforms, this month’s troubles began with a power outage at an eBay data center on October 29th, followed by network connectivity issue at an eBay data center on November 14th.
In addition, eBay acknowledged issues that caused problems with photo uploading (November 5) and with its Markdown Manager (October 16 – 19). Users have reported additional technical issues on Ecommerce EKG and elsewhere.
The timing of the latest incident was worrisome, as sellers prepare for Thanksgiving, the kickoff to the major holiday-shopping weekend that includes Black Friday and extends into Cyber Monday. And there’s always concerns on the part of sellers that marketplaces could be left understaffed over a major holiday like Thanksgiving.
In a posting at 6:01 pm ET on Wednesday, eBay outlined how it would protect sellersfrom the consequences of the outage.
