back to article eBay DROPS DEAD AGAIN - tat bazaar says sorry, scrambles to resurrect site

eBay went titsup earlier today, and the company is now attempting to bring its site back to life. The online tat bazaar coughed to an unexplained technical blunder preventing an unknown number of its subscribers from accessing the site, which many buyers and sellers of used goods enjoy using in their spare time on the weekends …

  1. Harry the Bastard

    "I think sellers need compensation, or at the very least auctions extended - we're losing money by ebay being down"

    oh ffs, get a shop

    1. Cliff

      Not really fair when sellers are paying for a service

    2. Daniel Johnson

      If you paid an auction house to sell your items, and the auction ended early because of a fire alarm, then all bids would be off.

      1. Mage Silver badge

        Fire Alarm

        And if a member of staff set it off accidently?

    3. Simon Barker

      Some people use eBay for their livelihoods, due to the auction format used on eBay often you find most of the money only comes in within the last 10 minutes so you might not be surprised to find out a lot of people might feel cheated if no one could bid on their items when they were finishing.

      Alternatively you could blame and tell them to get a shop as that's obviously a five minute job but I'd be willing to bet if it was your money you'd be a little less nonchalant about the matter.

      1. Harry the Bastard

        the fact is these people chose to use the service and chose to accept ebay's terms and conditions which give no promise of availability or reliability

        ebay isn't a human right, it's a choice they made, if it goes titsup they have to accept it, otherwise they can get a shop and manage the issues themselves

    4. ecofeco Silver badge

      Just to clarify, ebay uses both auction and just plain "straight price" retailing and long ago became a strictly business market that is very unwelcoming and unfriendly to a private seller who just wants to unload some stuff from the storage shed.

      1. squigbobble

        I call shenanigans.

        I've unloaded close a £1k of old crap on eBay over the years, including a solitary left glove I found in the pocket of a dead man's bike jacket that came with a bike I bought off autotrader. It's no harder to use (when you can actually log in to it) now than it was when I started. They even have promotions specifically for low volume sellers although you get bummed on the fees if you're not a business seller.

        The only significant change for amateur sellers is the new postage pricing which will be handy once I've actually managed to set up all the prices, lol.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I call shenanigans.

          "I've unloaded close a £1k of old crap on eBay over the years, including a solitary left glove I found in the pocket of a dead man's bike jacket that came with a bike I bought off autotrader."

          Wow. Think what ISIS could make on Ebay with all the stuff they must be finding in dead men's clothing at the moment.

          1. squigbobble

            Re: I call shenanigans.

            The glove went for 1p, lol. I always inflate the postage charges slightly to cover the eBay and PayPal fees when I'm doing a penny auction otherwise you can actually lose money on a sale.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      "oh ffs, get a shop"

      And when a utility company / council digs up the pavement so no one can get in, I guess your answer will be FFS get an online presence?

  2. BigFire

    One day after banning Redskins gears

    You think God of Internet have a sense of humor? After banning Redskins gears, the site goes down.

  3. Hipsterina

    "We are actively working on restoring the issue"

    If the issue they had in mind was the other recent outage, today's outage looks as if they restored it very successfully.

  4. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Tinfoil Hat time?

    Is it my imagination or is the Internet in general getting steadily more flakey?

    1. Martin-73 Silver badge

      Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

      I blame the cloud. Or microsoft. Possible apple?

    2. Mike_JC

      Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

      That is because ISPs are too bone idle to move to IPv6. The world is running short of IPv4 addresses.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

      Is it because most of the traffic is now being routed through NSA slurpers.

    4. orb8

      Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

      According to this site it's mainly Europe that's always struggling with data flow, and It's always showing a downward trend.

      http://internettrafficreport.com/

    5. ecofeco Silver badge

      Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

      It's not your imagination.

      Badly coded websites, too many operational layers piled on the servers, bad firmware, spam-bots (yes the world is crawling with them), slapped together data centers, underpaid support techs, and 24/7 hacking.

      The list is long.

      1. Anonymous Custard
        Terminator

        Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

        And this is before the IoT dawns and everyones fridge, toaster and bathroom cabinet join the fun.

        Who thought that was a good idea again?

  5. Mike Flugennock

    eBay DROPS DEAD AGAIN...

    ...and the problem is...?

    1. frank ly

      Re: eBay DROPS DEAD AGAIN...

      .... they bought their servers on eBay.

      1. Mike Flugennock
        Thumb Up

        Re: eBay DROPS DEAD AGAIN...

        "...they bought their servers on eBay."

        D'ohh, man, wotta burn.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pay twice

    They stitch you up with eBay fees and gouge you again by taking a cut from PayPal. Avoid this tat bazaar.

    1. Hipsterina

      Re: Pay twice

      "They stitch you up with eBay fees and gouge you again by taking a cut from PayPal. Avoid this tat bazaar."

      Yes.

      Just like anyone stitches you up by advertising services with associated costs, and punters say yes, take the services and the costs and feel well and truly stitched up.

      Every service should be cost free. Obviously.

      I'm sure that whatever you do, you do for no charge. I'm sure that you wouldn't stitch anyone up and then gouge them by charging anything for whatever you provide.

      1. Steven Raith
        Coat

        Re: Pay twice

        That'll be 25p for that upvote, Hipsterina.

        </coat>

        Steven R

        1. Hipsterina

          Re: Pay twice

          A snip at twice the price.

          Have an upvote on me. Free. Gratis. Good will gesture. Worth it to win a customer.

          1. Steven Raith

            Re: Pay twice

            Someone clearly disagrees.

            This upvote is only 15p.

            Invoice is in the post, dude.

            Steven R

    2. Carbon life unit 5,232,556

      Re: Pay twice

      Giving people what they want, at a price they're prepared to pay?!

      The bastards!

  7. RISC OS

    I amazed

    I didn't think ebay still existed... one lives and learns

  8. Congmen003

    Look Like: It's Time For Another Fee Increase for eBay.

    Great Time for Another Rate Increase for All eBay Sellers! All eBay should have their listing fees increase by 25%. Big bonus for all incompetent eBay management and employees, especially big dumb lazy and useless customer serve representatives who don't know to how give good customer service.

    1. Elmer Phud

      Re: Look Like: It's Time For Another Fee Increase for eBay.

      Almost! A! Yahoo! Post!

  9. Congmen003

    Big Bonus for All Incompetent eBay management and employees!

    All big fat lazy incompetent eBay customer service reps should have a big fat bonus for doing such a awesome job! No question ask. .

  10. Uncle Ron

    Huge

    Even though eBay is a huge, world-wide "thing" it just doesn't have the scale, or acumen, or skill to do all this stuff itself. As sure as I'm sitting here, there is as little "off-the shelf" stuff inside eBay as they can possibly manage to have. They start with open-source (read: free) SW. Then they build their own servers, network stuff, OS stack, messaging system, scheduler, DB, and on and on. They're just to good to use (and pay for) any horrible "vendor" stuff in their house. Their ego is equally too huge to admit that someone else may know better.

    Also, as sure as I'm sitting here, the outages they have had in the last week did, or should have, cost them as much as they have saved doing it themselves. I'll bet a steak dinner that DB2 and MQ and GPFS, or whatever Oracle sells that is similar but not as good, would not have let this happen. The big banks around the world know this, somebody should tell eBay execs.

    1. Hipsterina

      Re: Huge

      "... DB2 and MQ and GPFS, or whatever Oracle sells that is similar but not as good, would not have let this happen"

      Of course not. They are made of sparkly, intergalactic pixie dust, not the stuff that mere terrestrial software is built from.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Huge

      "As sure as I'm sitting here, there is as little "off-the shelf" stuff inside eBay as they can possibly manage to have."

      eBay runs on MicroSoft and Oracle products for the most part, so you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder if this was a routing table size issue, wasn't that the reason given for the issues a couple of months ago?

  12. Gordon 10

    The same release twice

    I wonder if it was the same code release two weekends running.

  13. Lostintranslation

    Wikipedia have them as a $60bn company.

    A $60bn company that can't keep a website up FFS.

  14. John Tserkezis

    I'm sorry, it was me who brought ebay down.

    I was trying to buy some porn, accidently put in "999999" in the quantity, and made a Paypal transfer request that my butt had insufficient funds to honour. (shamefully ripping off Futurama because it fits)

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