eBay experienced a search outage on Monday afternoon that started after 1:30 pm Eastern, with some sellers also reporting they were unable to list items. An eBay moderator responded to several reports on the
Tech Issues board at 2:50 pm: "Thank you for reporting the issue. The Product team is aware of the issue and is currently working on a fix to roll out ASAP."
Search appeared to be back up and running within an hour of reports first surfacing on eBay and industry boards. The search outage impacted the mobile and desktop, seemingly all devices and operating systems. It also impacted search via mobile phone cameras, with
one buyer tweeting in part: "I don't know what you guys did @ebay but your search via camera/pictures is NOT working."
One seller said when searching eBay mobile, only upcoming eBay Live shows were displaying, "which is not at all what I'm looking for." Another user wrote, "Can't even search for the main thing a seller sells on their own shop page."
Multiple reports came in from readers through email and on the
Ecommerce EKG board; at 2:11 pm, a seller reported, "eBay search is down, both on the site and in individual stores."
At 2:16 pm, another eBay seller reported on EKG: "Site search is non-functional. It loads the top (search bar, eBay logo, navigation) & the bottom (about eBay, copyright, etc.) with a thin grey line in between. The rest of the site is super laggy and barely functional. Traffic has basically stopped."
On
DownDetector, a seller anticipated a problem for sellers listing in the auction format due to the search outage: "Can't make listings or search for items. Nothing is populating on the search page. I'd hate to be running an auction that closed in this downtime with low bids. Ouch, lots of Sellers forced to be selling some low priced stuff. We shall see."
Another user wrote on Down Detector that the problem also impacted sellers' visibility in other ways: "View All Seller's Items.. blank page. Click on seller's name to see if they have a store, blank page. Search function, blank page results."
"But by god eBay Live is working like a champ," a frustrated seller wrote in a Facebook post, a reference to eBay's live-streaming auction platform, which is only available to a small percentage of sellers. ("eBay Live is currently in beta with select sellers,"
according to eBay help.)
