eBay and PayPal Both Experience Outage Thursday Evening

by: eXtinctBay

The picture says it all. M  E  L  T  D  O  W  N.........

And right during prime selling hours. Wonderful to pay exorbitant fees for this (lost sales volume).

OK, Wingnut & Sweetnuts, what's the excuse this time???

by: dans parts

I'm seeing eBay back up now, but my scheduled auctions at inkFrog (almost 2000 of them to start at 10pm) are now toast.  They're not re-scheduling or listing.

eBay's uploader apparently is not working right, and whatever inkFrog is trying to feed eBay, eBay is not taking it properly.

There goes 10-day exposure and about $1000 out the window.

by: winter-garden

What a mess!!  Lost sales, angry customers .. and not a word from ebay.  I'm sure they will deny that anything even happened.  Stuff happens sometimes, we understand that, but eBay's inability to accept responsibility for anything is what is really irksome ..

by: sasikat9

Its just dumb and dumber trying to outdo each other. How funny....

by: Santini

But...but...ebay and paypal are two separate companies. What a crazy coincidence!

by: Ric

I have no doubt that despite the corporate split, eBay and PayPal still share some of the same server capacity.

I remember eBay beating their chests about how they were using so much renewable energy to power their IT infrastructure.

Perhaps their solar arrays did not get sufficient sunlight today to fully power systems.

It's either that or someone forgot to feed the gerbils so their little wheels are not turning fast enough.

In the meantime, I am sure that senior programmers and system engineers for both companies are diligently at work redesigning meaningless pages while their primary systems are down.

Unless and until these companies make significant investments to  update their antique crumbling IT infrastructure, outages such as this will continue to plague eBay and PayPal customers.

Relying on eBay and PayPal to support your business is like trying to build a skyscraper on a pit of quicksand.

 

by: dans parts

@Ric -

I didn't think eBay used gerbils for their wheels - I've always considered them to be a higher form of rodent.  I'm sure eBay just gets rats from the sewers.  They probably will work cheaper than the gerbils, too...

What I saw tonight:
No Watch List
No Purchase History
No Feedback/Dashboard
Seller Hub was visible, but some items missing on Overview page - didn't try to move around in it.

Just by coincidence, I was already calling Customer Support at 9:55pm Eastern (about something else), at almost exactly the same moment eBay went down.  Customer Service never answered.

That makes 3 nights in a row I've not been able to get hold of them.  Tuesday, couldn't get Help&Contact page to show the phone number and generate a Passcode - kept telling me they weren't available - 2 hours before their stated ''closing'' time.  Last night, got the phone number & Passcode - said wait time was about 8 minutes.  I hung up after 50 minutes with no answer.  Tonight, as I was calling, the machine would not accept the Passcode that was generated.  When I got it to understand the word ''Selling'', it seemed to start all over again, then passed me off to ''next available'', but phone started making very strange noises in my ear (remember Twilight Zone?), and it hung up on me.

Also, my scheduled listings (set to begin listing at 10pm Eastern in inkFrog) did not list as normal.  Most finally did list almost 2 hours later, with a bunch of Errored listings that did not list.

After eBay hung up on me tonight, I told my wife I didn't think things could get a lot worse than not getting hold of (non-)Support for 3 days, but just after I said that, I realized eBay was down.

I should have known that with eBay, things can ALWAYS get worse.

What a fun evening at the computer.

by: The End

A few days ago, I was unable to purchase items on Ebay under FireFox. Internet Explorer was the fix.
Ebay has TONS of problems.
Etsy has no problems.
Locate your store accordingly.
And don't over-price your stuff.

by: Volvo351

Well, I didn't notice any outages as I was busy watching the Patriots dismantle the hapless Dolphins!

by: Basset

Lights out.  Did eBay pay their electric bill?

I tried to bid on two items and could not. Site was loading very slow and glitchy. Sometimes got a ''server not responding'' message using firefox and chrome. On one, I could not even log in.

My watch list disappeared.  Mobile device eBay did not work.  

The seller that I frequent lost out on a higher price as her item sold for starting bid. The second item got zero bids, so maybe I only lost out on one item.

Lots of buyers (and sellers) on twitter complaining. Certainly a way to send buyers somewhere else!

eBay lost another toe from shoot-self-in-foot syndrome.  

by: JQ

Perhaps it is worth mentioning, eBay went through their worst period of technical meltdown last year between October and December. Several extended periods when the entire site was unusable, plus two big "glitches" (i.e. incompetent programming) which prevented users from performing basic functions on the site for several days.

Maybe this blackout is the first of what will again prove to be a cluster of technical collapses on the site. Fingers crossed that this will not happen. The whole site seems basically held together by duct tape and wishful thinking at this point.

by: iheartjacksparrow

Santini has the same observation I do: Two completely separate companies that miraculously fail at the same time? What are the odds? (And I'm sure Toolguy will come here and state that he was getting orders all through the "blackout.")

It's interesting that JD destroys eBay, then moves to PayPal and it begins falling apart.  

by: wasteland-mechanic

What happened to all the feebay cheerleaders? I guess they have the day off.

by: Rexford

Two separate companies? What a joke.  On paper maybe. Thick as thieves, literally.

by: Bloggo

With all that was involved in the eBay/PayPal split, someone forgot to order more 3.5" floppy disks.

by: ebayisscrewed

Pay Pal - Addresses users concerns via twitter and replies to outage concerns

Ebay Twitter - Deletes or Hides posts discussing the outage and does not reply to a single one.  

This is the same eBay Twitter Support team that told me to try a different browser or clear my cache to correct the Markdown Manager issue.  

I have noticed that you will receive no assistance from the ebay support accounts, but if you tweet Devin Wenig or blow up aother board members twitter accounts you will get support fast, very fast.  

by: Basset

Yes, I noticed eBay twitter was filled with ''buy stuff'' tweets.

Way to annoy more buyers, since they would be UNABLE to do just that with the site down.

The #ebaydown twitter had much more complaint tweets.

by: tango

-30 % in sales this week -  severe drop started on Wednesday when buyers could no longer search by Manufacturer Part number, some buyers couldn't even bring up listings by Ebay item #.  Completely tanked -  not a good situation - Ebay needs to get their programming under control.  All their new programing generally kills what was working previously. We don't sell - Ebay makes no money, bottom line.

by: drumnguy

I am calling shenanigans!  These large e-commerce companies have multiple redundancies for power...dual feeds from the city grid, huge UPS backups and diesel generators.  Not to mention redundant data centers in different parts of the country or globe.  If eBay went down hard, it was not due to a power outage.  I bet they got hacked again!!

by: ebayisscrewed

@drumguy

I have to say I was thinking the same thing my friend.