
eBay stated that users had trouble accessing the site for a short period on Wednesday, though the acknowledgement came in responses to posts on Twitter rather than in any announcement we could find.
The problem was reported on
Ecommerce EKG at 2:30 am, and Down Detector shows a huge spike of reports that came in overnight between about 1 am - 4 am.
This was a typical tweet that came in during the incident (2:56 am): "@askebay ebay power seller with 25000+ fb here, the site and app are down and I cannot process my orders!"
AskeBay responded at 2:41 pm: "eBay experienced technical difficulties for a short period today, where users may have temporarily had trouble accessing the site. The issue is now fully resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience!"
And at 2:44 am, a user tweeted: "@AskeBay your site is down," to which AskeBay responded at 2:27 pm: "hi! eBay experienced technical difficulties for a short period today, where users may have temporarily had trouble accessing the http://site.As of now everything should be up and running. I apologize for any inconvenience this brought."
One buyer who posted on a thread on the eBay discussion board shows how costly such incidents can be for sellers - the user was unable to bid on an auction during the incident and reported that the item she wanted had sold for $10 less than what she had been trying to enter as a bid.
Her post also shows how damaging technical issues can be for eBay as well: "Heck with it," she wrote, "It's now 2:53 a.m. and I'm going to shop on Amazon, so much less stressful and they will at least answer the phone when you have some problem... uuuggghhh."
One seller described a problem with Promoted Listings data, which disappeared, though it's not clear if that was a separate glitch. And some sellers reported some issues had started on Tuesday afternoon.
Since we could find no acknowledgement or announcement about the incident other than responses on social media, we sent an inquiry to eBay this evening asking for the cause of the technical issues and whether eBay would protect sellers who had been impacted by the incident.
Let us know if you were impacted, how you feel eBay responded, and please follow up and let us know if eBay makes things right for any consequences resulting from the incident.