On Sunday, popular online auction site eBay confirmed that search outages, including a messed up search result, over the weekend resulted from a “technical issue”. The site was quickly restored but the company still wants to take caution.
“We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today,” a post on the company’s eBay Ink blog read.
“As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results.”
According to the company, the technical issue was caused by “a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago.”
eBay members expressed their discontent over the outage. They are requesting refunds for seller fees if their auctions were disrupted as a result.
“I had a one day auction ending today, (and) no one was obviously able to bid on it because they couldn’t search for it,” an eBay seller said on the eBay Ink blog. “Will I get a credit for this?”
According to an analyst release from JP Morgan Chase, it did not anticipate the outage would have an effect on eBay’s fourth-quarter earnings. I know eBay wants that too. 🙂
