Jan 2002

Feb 2002

Mar 2002

Apr 2002

May 2002

Jun 2002

Jul 2002

Aug 2002

Sep 2002

Oct 2002

Nov 2002

Dec 2002

On 1 Dec at 08:19 PT sellers reported that PayPal was sending automated winning bidder invoices to the under bidders on closed auctions. The sold page at PayPal was showing the wrong person as the high bidder on some but not all auctions. The only solution PayPal had to offer was for the seller to turn off the automated feature until PayPal fixed it. At 11:59:14 PT users reported that ebaY was having problems. Trying to access About Me pages returned page not found messages. Users also received page not found messages whilst trying to access the chat boards. At 12:03:48 PT sellers reported TurboLister was not working, as it kept trying to update but couldn't. At 12:34:33 PT users reported PayPal was very slow. PayPal was back to normal at 12:39:03 PT.

On 2 Dec at 09:42:42 PT users reported the ebaY email system was not working, returning error messages. At 12:19:29 PT buyers received "Item details currently unavailable" whilst trying to access listings. Buyers could not access auctions through 12:52:23 PT. At 13:24:12 PT ebaY posted that the PayPal problems with winning bidder notice delays and glitches had been fixed. The logo autominsertion feature was still broken. At 13:29:39 PT users reported getting "Page Not Found" messages whilst trying to access ebaY pages. At 23:58:15 PT sellers reported they could not revise auctions getting messages that said the auction had bids or less than 12 hours left to run, though neither condition existed.

On 3 Dec at 04:06:47 GT, ebaY reported that their UK site was down due to a Detagging issue. The DNS name www.ebay.co.uk was not showing up on the net from 10:30 GT to 12:40 GT. Anyone trying to access the ebaY UK domain name received an error message during this time. ebaY said, "Whilst the initial cause was essentially short-lived, the bad data propagated across various ISPs. Although the registration issue has been resolved, certain users may experience intermittent errors for a short while." An article on the subject - "eBAY UK is detagged! By Drew Cullen Posted: 03/12/2002 at 11:26 GMT Reader reports have flooded in this morning concerning the 'disappearance' of ebay.co.uk from the Web. Our informants kindly did the legwork for us, pointing us to the Nominet who is entry for ebay.co.uk. And there we have our answer: "This registration is DETAGGED". Update: within five minutes of publishing this article - the who is records were amended to show registrant's agent and name servers. If there is any difficulty reaching eBay.co.uk today, you can still reach items to bid for via the eBay.com site, Reg reader Pete Foster advises. Just use the advanced search function and look for items located in the United Kingdom. This could be a great time to get stuff cheap as people who normally use ebay.co.uk aren't going to be able to bid. ;o) Alternatively, here is the IP address - http://66.135.192.41/. So what went wrong? We've put in the call to eBay, but we guess their employees have better things to do right now. Detagging means that the "email or web site associated with the domain name will stop working". Detagging takes a while to work its way through the Net, as the domain root servers update their DNS records, so there can be disruption for a minimum of 48 hours. We speak from experience: last year an employee at PSINet Europe, The Register's DNS record keeper, wrongly deleted us from its customer records and detagged our website address with Nominet. On Christmas Eve. It took us almost three days to get back on air." TAG wonders why ebaY did not issue refunds and auction extensions since their user agreement requires them to do so.

On 3 Dec at 04:07:56 PT a seller reported listing two items with featured in category, was charged for this feature but did neither item showed up as featured. TAG has been getting intermittent reports of this happening. Our first recommendation is to never use these extra ebaY features, as they are a waste of money Our second recommendation is, if you use any ebaY features, you carefully monitor your listings to insure you receive the features you pay for. At 06:17:55 PT users reported getting input errors whilst trying to navigate their My ebaY page. At 06:58:04 PT ebaY reported that title search was down from 05:00 PT to 06:55 PT. This problem affected the US and International sites. At 14:43:13 PT sellers reported that Mister Lister was not working. ebaY sent email that the items were ready, but they could not be found on ebaY. At 14:59:51 PT users were receiving page not found messages and input errors across the site, though relisitng was working. At 20:01:12 PT buyers trying to access auctions were receiving "Item details currently unavailable" messages. At 20:47:34 PT users reported the site was having intermittent outages. At 21:17:30 PT buyers were not able to access auction listings, receiving "item details are unavailable messages. At 21:30:34 PT search was returning "Cant Display Page" messages. At 21:32:14 PT buyers could not open auctions, and all auctions ere showing as unavailable. At 21:39:10 PT sellers reported that their auctions were showing as closed, even though the auction had several hours remaining to run. At 21:43:33 PT sellers reported that items that had recently closed were showing invalid item messages. At 21:49:07 PT ebaY reported that the ability to access items that have already ended was down. This outage prevented users from relisting and from posting feedback. At 22:10:51 PT buyers reported they could not access auctions, receiving "Item details currently unavailable" messages. At 22:14:40 PT ebaY posted that the ability to access ended items was down from 21:28 PT to 22:08 PT. At 22:33:45 PT sellers reported that items that closed today had disappeared from My ebaY.

On 4 Dec at 01:49:28 PT buyers reported that they received "Item details currently unavailable" whilst trying to access auctions. At 02:10:12 PT at buyers continued to report they could not open auctions to bid or view. At 07:25:26 PT users reported they could not get the sign in to hold, even when opted for, "keep me signed in". At 07:28:26 PT more users reported in with sign in problems. At 08:05:17 PT users reported getting bad request errors when trying to access the site. At 08:43:11 PT sellers reported their customers were receiving late payment invoices from PayPal long after auctions had closed and been paid for. ebaY said this problem was fixed, but users report otherwise. At 08:51:14 PT users reported their ebaY spyware toolbar was no longer working. My Bid and My Watch Lists would not refresh/update. At 09:46:47 PT users reported their ebaY free counters provided by Andale were no longer working.

On 5 Dec at 08:49:51 PT users reported that search was not working. Search would yield a list of categories, with no way to access actual auctions. At 20:56:35 PT some email addresses were appearing across the site, in situations where they should not have. At 21:01:56 PT more users reported email addresses were again exposed to the public where they should not have been visible. Users also reported getting cgi6 error messages when trying to access sellers lists.

On 6 Dec at 07:05:37 PT buyers reported that search was not working. No auction listings were appearing on the page. At 07:56:50 PT more buyers reported they were having so much trouble searching ebaY, they were making purchases elsewhere. At 13:48:52 PT users reported title search was not working at all, and cgi 6 was down preventing access to seller's lists. At 18:02:51 PT users trying to access the site were receiving "connection is refused by cgi.ebay.com". At 21:06:23 PT ebaY reported that their ebaY-o-rama store was down.

ebaY was stable on 7 Dec

On 8 Dec at 05:29:48 PT users reported getting page can't be displayed messages whilst trying to access the site. At 11:11:10 PT users received cgi3 errors when trying to sign in and post to the boards. At 11:16:13 PT the whole site started to go down. the site crashed from 11:28:07 PT to 11:41:59 PT. At 11:42:55 PT users reported the ebaY US site was down and the ebaY CA was also crashed. At 11:43:47 PT, users reported receiving messages that, "This function is currently unavailable We apologize that you are not able to access this feature at the present time. Our Technical Support Team has been notified and we are working on resolving this difficulty as quickly as possible." At 11:44:38 PT users who were able to get into the site reported that My ebaY was also not working. At 11:47:23 PT users continued reporting cgi 3 problems, preventing them from accessing the chat boards and signing in. Most site functions came back at 11:48:48 PT. At 16:08:02 PT users again received error messages "Network Error Unable to read URL from host cgi.ebay.com: Connection reset by peer" whilst trying to access ebaY. At 16:10:34 PT buyers were not able to view items or get in to bid. At 16:12:37 PT users continued to report widespread outages with blank pages or error messages returned across the site. At 16:12:48 PT users reported My ebaY down and all auction inaccessible. The site appeared to come back up at 16:17:36 PT. At 16:20:21 PT ebaY reported that completed items was down and that auction listings were "unavailable for a very brief period, but are now unaffected." At 16:23:26 PT users continued to report everything in My ebaY showing as unavailable. At 16:26:07 PT users reported the feedback system was down. At 16:35:10 PT sellers reported the API was down for relisting. The site came back up at 16:45:07 PT but users reported problems again at 16:48:51 PT. cgi 6 returned error messages preventing access to sellers lists. At 16:53:37 PT users received more error messages whilst trying to access the site. At 16:56:28 PT sellers continued to report not being able to relist items, as they were showing unavailable. At 17:06:34 PT ebaY posted that completed items were down from 16:07 PT to 16:50 PT. ebaY says active auction listings were down for five minutes of that time. At 17:19:50 PT users reported sellers lists on cgi 6 were not available and this continued through 23:54:34 PT.

On 9 Dec at 04:48:40 PT users reported that search was not workingwith subsequent pages of search results coming up blank or with error messages. At 19:16:53 PT users reported PayPal was down. At 21:26:58 PT users got "website not responding" messages when trying to connect to cgi 3 whilst attempting to reach the chat boards or sign in. At 22:01:16 PT users reported widespread 404 errors and at 22:11:27 PT, 405 errors.

On 10 Dec at 02:51:54 PT users reported the feedback system was not working returning "Internal error The feedback you requested is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few minutes" messages. At 06:25:07 PT Netscape users reported they could no longer see the links at the top of ebaY pages, including the log out link. At 07:56:35 PT users reported that PayPal was returning error messages, so they could not get in to use their accounts. At 12:09:55 PT users received "Web Site Not Responding The web site you have requested may be experiencing technical difficulties due to a busy or broken server. Please try again by clicking the Reload icon on your navigation bar or, if that doesn't work, you may want to return to the site at a later time. 502 Connection Failed ... This function is currently unavailable We apologize that you are not able to access this feature at the present time. Our Technical Support Team has been notified and we are working on resolving this difficulty as quickly as possible. Please visit the eBay Announcements Board for updates on recent and upcoming changes, major system issues, and other important eBay news.http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml" across the site. These problems continued until 12:14:09 PT when the whole site crashed then came back up. At 17:27:37 PT sellers reported intermittent problems whilst trying to list.

On 11 Dec at 05:49:34 PT sellers reported they could not get Turbo Lister to work after a fresh download. At 06:23:22 PT users reported more problems with search for pottery items returning real estate auctions. At 07:51:02 PT users reported their items were showing as ended, despite the fact that the auctions had over ten hours to run. At 08:19:31 PT sellers reported that their Shooting Star auction management software. was no longer pulling selling data due to ebaY changes. At 08:34:26 PT more users reported the items on their sellers pages were showing as closed even though the auctions were supposed to still be active. At 08:39:44 PT users reported items on seller's pages were showing out of sequence. At 08:41:33 PT the reports of items that were still open showing as closed continued. At 08:44:19 PT sellers reported that buyers were being charged twice for the same auction. This appeared to be happening as sellers auctions showed as closed then open then closed again, with the buyer receiving an invoice each time. In other cases the buyer would pay for an items and be charged twice by PayPal. At 08:57:33 PT users continued to report items on sellers lists showing as closed then open then closed at intermittent intervals. At 09:00:47 PT users reported that some of the items showing incorrectly as closed on the sellers list, were still active if you clicked on them. At 09:03:49 PT users reported search not working, returning zero items and then on a second input returning active listings. items. At 09:07:46 PT users continued to report problems with the seller's page and search. At 09:10:03 PT users reported the seller's lists and auctions back to normal for a few minutes with the search glitches starting again at 09:16:27 PT. At 09:30:55 PT users reported getting 400 errors whilst trying to access ebaY. At 09:39:59 PT users reported getting blank screens whilst trying to access ebaY. At 10:03:18 PT users reported that My ebaY was not working. At 10:08:39 PT sellers reported that the closing times on their auctions had been changed by several hours. At 10:16:38 PT users reported their third party software was no longer working. At 10:25:44 PT sellers reported the alpha sort on their seller's page was no longer working. At 10:36:41 PT buyers reported that PayPal was not working properly, preventing buyers from paying using PayPal. At 10:54:00 PT users reported that the ending times were all confused and switched around. Items that had already ended and two different people, each thought they won the item. At 10:58:50 PT users posted that all the code changes were a violation of the ebaY promised quiet period. In order to have a stable site in the peak holiday buying season, ebaY would have to stop altering the code. As one seller noted, "There is NO SUCH THING as "routine code maintenance" when you ALTER existing code from a working, *functional* condition to a broken, *dysfunctional* condition." At 11:00:44 PT sellers reported that many of their auctions had ended, though they were not supposed to end for 9 to 12 hours. At 11:05:20 PT users reported that cgi 2 was down, preventing access to the feedback system. At 11:33:29 PT auctions on sellers lists were showing as closed. ebaY's logo was showing on pages as a red X in a box. At 11:38:09 PT users reported that the sellers lists were showing a blank right column with no ending times showing. At 12:02:54 PT users reported that the site appeared to be correcting, with sellers lists and times showing up correctly. At 13:26:30 PT many sellers reported that auctions scheduled to end the following day were now showing as scheduled to end 8 to 12 hours earlier. At 13:40:07 PT users again received 400 error messages. At 13:51:22 PT most auctions were again showing correct ending times, though some auctions toggled between correct ending times and unsheduled 03:00 ending times. This continued to be reported until 13:53:17 PT. At 14:17:12 PT sellers reported they could not list items.

On 12 Dec at 07:30:48 PT users reported that search was not working properly, with results from the same search returning different results on each submission. At 10:13:37 PT sellers reported that closed and sold items were showing up again as current open listings. At 14:39:22 PT sellers reported that they were not receiving notices from PayPal of payments. At 14:54:54 PT buyers reported that when trying to bid they received messages that, "Problem with bid amount Sorry, the bid amount you entered is not valid. Please make sure you are not using a comma as a decimal separator and that you are not using any space or any currency symbol." though the bid amount was correct. At 15:05:17 PT buyers reported that every time they tried to enter a bid they received a message that the item had already closed, even though the items had 20 to 45 minutes to run. At 17:09:42 PT more buyers reported problems with search not working. At 17:27:50 PT, users reported that their third party software was no longer working. Shooting Star and Auction Helper were two of the auction management software products mentioned. At 18:26:00 PT sellers reported they could not upload Turbo Lister collections. At 18:37:03 PT sellers posted about a message they received from ebaY warning them that ebaY would remove the SYI1.0 form in early January. Further info could be found at http://pages.ebay.com/sell/previoussellyouritem/faq.html From the number of posts on the boards it appears there are 10s of thousands of users still using SYI1.0. At 20:12:52 PT, sellers reported having problems with listing, being unable to get past the third page of the form.

On 13 Dec at 06:41:41 PT users reported the search engine was not working. The search wouold return several hundred items, but only show the items on the first page results. All subsequent pages would come up with zero items found messages. At 08:23:56 PT users were having trouble signing in. When they tried to list an item the sign in would return, "HTTP Error 400 Bad Request Due to malformed syntax, the request could not be understood by the server. The client should not repeat the request without modifications." At 11:50:46 PT users reported the ebaY counters provided by Andale were not working, showing drastically different numbers with each refresh of the page. At 12:26:53 PT ebaY posted that My ebaY was broken from 08:00 PT to 11:50 PT. Items were not accessible from My ebaY. Affected categories included Coins, Consumer Electronics, Dolls and Bears, Photo and Optics, Tickets and Travel. At 18:35:13 PT a seller reported that some of their active auctions were changed from a standard listing to a dutch auction, though there was only one item per auction, not multiples. At 18:55:05 PT sellers reported problems with listing using SYI2.0. They could not get past the item category screen.

On 14 Dec at 10:13:14 PT users reported the failure of the PayPal money back guarantee. It appeared to yield no better a result than not paying for the extra insurance as it was supposed to be a no questions asked refund for the buyer, yet resulted in the same investigation and time delay as would occur without the insurance. At 10:14:58 PT auctions were again showing out of order on search results. At 22:12:35 PT users reported receiving 404 error messages when trying to select a category on the SYI2.0 form.

On 15 Dec at 06:52:28 PT users reported the ebaY search engine was not working properly and not retuning normal results. At 07:00:16 PT buyers reported blank pages returned on search. At 08:48:39 PT common searches retuned zero results. At 10:09:10 PT users had to come through another ebaY site such as ebaY Australia, in order to get access to ebaY. They received error messages saying, "569 No Data This Web page could not be opened with the specified browser request. Please try again later" At 10:48:24 PT search was still not working properly, returning one or zero results on common searches. At 10:59:46 PT sellers reported SYI2.0 was loading very slowly, timing out and not loading at all. At 20:16:50 PT users again reported Turbo Lister was stuck on an infinite download, yielding try later messages. At 20:47:04 PT auction ending times were in flux showing 3 minutes remaining on one refresh and 11 minutes on the next refresh. At 21:04:38 PT buyers again reported search was not working. At 21:07:12 PT users could not get access to the chat boards receiving "569 No Data This Web page could not be opened with the specified browser request. Please try again later." messages.

On 16 Dec at 08:54:37 PT users reported that PayPal was not working. Trying to access ones account yielded messages, "Your Recent Activity is currently unavailable. Please try again in one hour. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause." This was the start of a day of PayPal and ebaY outages. At 11:21:09 PT more users reported getting PayPal inaccessibility messages. At 11:22:43 PT users reported "Web Site Not Responding The web site you have requested may be experiencing technical difficulties due to a busy or broken server." messages whilst trying to get to ebaY. At 11:54:00 PT My ebaY was not working. At 12:16:57 PT users reported "An Internal Error has occurred Please try again. If this message persists please report this problem to Customer Support." messages. At 12:54:22 PT users reported "Web Site Not Responding The web site you have requested may be experiencing technical difficulties due to a busy or broken server." messages. At 12:59:21 PT users reported PayPal still down, getting messages that 'Your Recent Activity is currently unavailable.". At 13:02:10 PT ebaY was again playing Alice in Wonderland mushroom games with the fonts on the site, with the fonts getting smaller and smaller. At 13:20:40 PT users were reporting problems with ebaY's PayPal link from the closed auction page creating a corrupted payment address link, causing buyers to pay a nonexistent seller ID. At 13:24:01 PT sellers reported that using SYI2.0 on relist was not working properly, in that hitting the back button on a relist in progress would lose all the information on the page. At 13:39:15 PT PayPal was still not accessible. At 14:27 PT cgi2 was down preventing users from accessing the feedback system. At 15:21:56 PT ebaY posted that they were changing the fonts on the sellers listing pages. ebaY said they are using Arial, despite its poor quality for ease of reading. At 15:23:41 PT, users reported receiving web site not responding messages. At 15:25:46 PT the sellers page was down, returning page not responding messages. Fonts on various pages were changing with every refresh. At 15:59:59 PT users reported PayPal was still down. At 16:00:20 PT users trying to post on the chat boards received "569 No Data This Web page could not be opened with the specified browser request. Please try again later." messages. At 16:18:00 PT PayPal continued to be down. At 19:54:41 PT users reported PayPal still down. At 20:02:29 PT users reported getting "page not found" and 405 errors. Search was also not working properly. At 20:35:52 PT ebaY posted that the changes they were making to the ebaY portions of the sellers listing page, though not supposed to affect the sellers description portion, was nevertheless corrupting that section of the listing page. ebaY said it could take upwards of 2 days to return the sellers fonts to their proper format. At 20:55:26 PT ebaY announced they were taking PayPal down for emergency maintenance between approx 23:00 PT on 16 Dec and 02:30 PT on 17 Dec. At 22:45:50 PT users reported page reloads were very slow

On 17 Dec at 07:14:05 PT ebaY posted that completed search was down from 06:09 PT to 06:50 PT. At 08:29:34 PT users on ebaY US were getting instructions in German. At 12:15:10 PT users reported problems with the SYI2.0 form making it very difficult to list on the site. At 12:50:13 PT cgi2 was very slow causing problems with access to the feedback system. At 13:07:45 PT sellers reported cgi5 very slow causing problems with listing. Some sellers reported they thought ebaY was limiting the number of characters in the description box. At 13:14:54 PT users received 400 errors whislt trying to access the site. Users continued to report these intermittent 400 error problems through 14:24:33 PT. At 16:56:34 PT users received peer error messages. At 17:03:10 PT users received "page cannot be displayed" messages. At 19:19:53 PT listings with gallery options were not showing the gallery images. At 19:37:14 PT buyers reported that they were not able to pay through checkout using PayPal. At 20:13:05 PT sellers reported Second Choice was not working. AOL users were still having problems mailing others using ebaY's system with a %40 instead of an @ inserted. At 20:54:05 PT, users reported 404, 405 and page not found messages, whilst trying to access ebaY.

On 18 Dec at 04:51:48 PT users reported that their Zone Alarm upgrade alerted them to web bugs ebaY and Andale were trying to plant on the users computers. At 04:55:26 PT sellers reported ebaY listing confirmation emails were very slow, arriving upwards of 12 hour after listing. At 05:49:39 PT search was not working, returning only a small percentage of available listings. At 06:11:54 PT buyers reported having to refresh a search 5 or more times to get the proper result to come up. At 07:21:52 PT sellers reported gallery option they had paid for, was not working, with delays of over 12 hours for the images to index when they index at all. At 07:30:50 PT 10 digit auction numbers were showing as non-existent on the site, with only 9 digit numbers searchable. At 13:19:07 PT sellers reported they were not receiving notices of payment from PayPal. At 13:39:52 PT users reported that access to PayPal was very slow. At 15:52:46 PT PayPal was not accessible. At 16:05:11 PT sellers reported that listing confirmation emails were running 10 hours behind. At 16:29:14 PT users reported receiving 404 errors whilst trying to access the site. At 18:52:13 PT users received "Website Not Responding" when trying to access the site. At 18:52:42 PT users could not access Turbo Lister, receiving network setting problem messages. At 18:53:09 PT users reported the site had slowed to a crawl. This continued until 22:51:32 PT.

On 19 Dec at 02:48:22 PT users reported PayPal was very slow. At 09:02:28 PT API users reported the developer site was down. At 11:19:40 PT the leave feedback function was not working. The feedback system came back up at 11:37:18 PT but went back down again at 11:57:13 PT, yielding "Website Not Responding" messages. At 14:11:27 PT users trying to access the site got HTTP 400 errors. These errors have been happening since 11 Dec as a reoccurring intermittent chronic problem. At 15:40:22 PT sellers reported having an auction flagged because their starting price was higher than their electronic check limit. The only way to solve this problem is to remove ebaY Billpoint from the auction. TAG wonders if this same problem will occur with PayPal, if ebaY will set secret limits for sellers. At 18:37:15 PT search was not working with clicking on items returning invalid item notices. At 20:12 PT users reported cgi.ebay.com returning page with no data messages on a bookmarked retrieval of an existing auction page. At 22:18:22 PT users trying to access ebaY reported HTTP Error 500 messages.

On 20 Dec ebaY took both their system and PayPal down for maintenance, from 23:51:09 PT to 03:20:05 PT. At 04:27:12 P ebaY reported that search was showing items as unavailable with a start date for the item that was in the future. This outage affected both Title and Title/Description search. ebaY said it would take several hours to correct the problems. At 05:34:23 PT ebaY again noted the search problem with current items showing as unavailable. At 08:06:53 PT a buyer reported a closed item, that had no bids, and that they did not bid on, was showing in their Items Won section of My ebaY. At 16:47:36 PT ebaY announced that the ebaY discussion boards and answer center were down from 15:45 PT to 16:20 PT.

On 21 Dec at 03:49:25 PT sellers reported receiving listing confirmation emails from ebaY for items listed 5 days earlier. At 10:02:09 PT users of the zonealarm program reported that when they used ebaY they were being notified that a "private header" was blocked and "web bugs" were blocked. It looks as if ebaY has added more spyware on their system. At 15:05:20 PT Turbo Lister users were blocked from completing the listing form, with blank pages coming up for page 2 and 3.

On 22 Dec the site was stable through the first part of the day. At 17:55:28 PT users reported that email addresses were showing up in inappropriate places across the site. This only lasted a very short time.

On 23 Dec the site was stable.

On 24 Dec at 11:25:47 PT users again reported the ongoing, intermittent and sporadic http:400 errors whislt trying to access various features on the site. At 11:29:42 PT users reported getting the 400 error messages when trying to list/relist/revise, posting in to the chat boards and posting in the forums. At 11:39:37 PT users received page cannot be found messages on cgi 3 affecting board posting and log in, and "HTTP 400 Bad Request Internet Explorer " messages. At 11:47:00 PT more users reported getting 404 and 405 error messages. Accessing ebaY through the Canadian site did not cause the same errors to appear.

On 25 Dec at 18:28:50 PT users reported they could not access PayPal. ebaY was stable for the rest of the day.

On 26 Dec at 07:42:51 PT, users reported that the portal page for Classic Cars had its links crossed with the link for Mercedes Benz pointing to Jaguar. At 10:47:16 PT, the first of the API based third party service providers crashed, when Andale ground to a screeching halt under the influx of free listings. At 12:20:02 PT sellers trying to relist items received messages that they were not the original seller. This glitch occurred intermittently throughout the day. At 12:21:44 PT sellers reported Mister Lister and the API working well for uploading items, but SYI2.0 was broken for relists. At 12:24:11 PT SYI 2.0 has stopped working, and at 12:34:44 PT the SYI2.0 relist form "This function is currently unavailable We apologize that you are not able to access this feature at the present time.' messages, along with the "not the original seller" messages. Sellers sign in was not holding, requiring multiple sign ins in the midst of listing. At 12:41:39 PT sign in went down completely. At 12:50:18 PT "not the seller" messages were again popping up on attempts to relist. At 12:50:21 PT the chronic http:400 errors were rearing up again. At 12:52:15 PT relist on SYI2.0 was still not working. At 13:00 SYI2.0 went down, preventing listing. At 13:03:51 PT sellers using the sell similar item from My ebaY was returning "not the seller" messages. At 13:11:18 PT sellers trying to list an item from sell similar were receiving http:400 error messages. At 13:39:12 PT sellers continued to report problems with the sign in on SYI2.0 relists. At 14:51:20 PT SYI2.0 was working again. At 15:49:52 PT users had trouble posting to the chat boards, receiving messages that the board was invalid, and no longer available. At 15:53:13 PT the entire site started to crash with the API going down at 15:54:25 PT, and cgi 5 returning error messages. At 15:54:33 PT Turbo Lister was returning error messages. At 16:01:14 PT the servers came back up briefly and went back down again. At 16:09:17 PT the site came back up again, though revise and add to description were down. At 16:12:40 PT SYI1.0 went down, and SYI2.0 went down again. Service was restored at 16:13:04 PT. At 16:14:11 PT sellers reported that the sign in was not working on the SYI2.0 form again. At 16:19:59 PT attempts to access the chat boards yielded messages that the board was no longer available. SYI2.0 yielded messages that the site was not responding. At 16:24:58 PT users of AuctionSubmit software reported they were having trouble submitting auctions. Users of Channel Advisor, Andale and Auction Watch all reported the same problems. At 16:29:21 PT search was down returning 502 Connection Failed messages. At 16:35:08 PT some listings started to go through. At 16:36:56 PT users received more invalid board messages. At 16:43:58 PT sellers again complained about sign in not working. At 17:21:50 PT users reported they could not complete a listing, with network errors when trying to move forward in the listing. At 17:23:53 PT revise an auction crashed. At 17:25:52 PT sellers reported they could not sign in to sell using SYI2.0. At 17:26:08 PT sellers trying to relist and revise again received messages they were not the seller of their items. At 18:35:35 PT the frustration with ebaY was revealed when one seller said, "eBay: I have figured out what the 'e'stands for in your name. It stands for evil. You have "given" us a free listing day and then you made it impossible to list anything. I have not been able to list anything all day. Thanx a lot evilBay. You can have your FLD and do with it whatever you wish." At 19:05:45 PT users reported that PayPal was not working, returning error messages. At 19:09:07 PT ebaY slowed down to a crawl. At 19:17 sellers reported cgi5 down again preventing listings. At 19:26:41 PT ebaY announced that "Some members are experiencing issues with certain eBay functions, including the ability to list items. We are aware of this situation, and working to correct it as quickly as possible". At 19:29:24 PT more parts of the site crashed. At 19:29:35 PT buyers reported PayPal would not let them in to pay for items. At 19:31:13 PT users reported cgi 5 crashed preventing listing and cgi 3 crashed preventing sign in and board access. At 19:31:31 PT Mister Lister went down, with attempts to submit collections returning a message, "Dear eBay Customer, Thank you for using Mister Lister. The Mister Lister service is currently unavailable. Please try sending in your collection at a later time. Thank you." At 19:33:54 PT users were once again receiving "this chat board is no longer available' messages. At 19:38:03 PT, sellers reported it taking 26 minutes to list one auction because of the crashes and glitches. At 19:39:48 PT SYI 1.0 started glitching out sporadically. At 19:40:20 PT Mister Lister came back up. At 19:41:25 PT users reported more cgi 3 errors. At 19:42:18 PT cgi 6 crashed taking down seller lists. At 20:13:23 PT ebaY, posted that, "Some members experienced issues with certain eBay functions, including the ability to list items, from 19:10 PST to 19:45 PST. The issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." TAG finds the posting a little understated, and it was the only acknowledgement of the problems users had throughout the day. At 20:25:33 PT users again reported that the site was virtually down with listing, search and bidding inaccessible. Cgi 6 went down at 20:45:58 PT, yielding a new error message, "The XML page cannot be displayed Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error". At 21:22:13 PT buyers reported they could not pay using PayPal via the direct link from the listing page. At 21:28:52 PT submissions through Mister Lister yielded run time error messages causing the whole collection to disappear. At 22:39:43 PT the site crashed again, with most functions down for several minutes. At 22:40:33 PT cgi 5 remained down, not permitting listing. These problems continued to occur intermittently through 24:00 when the free listing day ended, causing manylistings, collections and third party sites to not be able to post auctions in time to qualify for the free listings.

On 27 Dec at 03:49:17 PT users trying to revise items listed on 26 Dec, received messages that the item would end during regularly scheduled maintenance. This message was not correct since the item would end before maintenance took place, but for some reason the item was using the time of revision as the ended time rather that the actual auciton ending time. This problem was reported throughout the day as sellers worked on revising items listed the day before. At 09:20:47 PT users reported cgi 6 down, preventing access to sellers lists. At 13:18:23 PT, users reported 404 Error when trying to bid. At 14:07:04 PT items were disappearing from My ebaY pages, but were back at 14:11:15 PT. The site was stable for the rest of the day.

On 28 Dec a seller reported hearing from a buyer that the buyer could not place a bid on a sellers auction, so wrote to ebaY to report the problem, an internal error message. ebaY responded to the buyer that ebaY was aware of the problem and were working on it. In an interesting move, ebaY recommended the buyer contact the seller with a workaround, which involved the seller revise their item, change the category to a new category, submit the change, and then change the category back to the original one with another revision to the auction. Unfortunately ebaY did not see fit to post this known problem on their status announcement board, to let more sellers know about the problem. At 08:11:10 PT, sellers reported they had to keep signing in whilst using SYI2.0 as they navigated from page to page in the process, which then deleted all info and forced them to start all over. At 11:59:48 PT more sellers reported buyer contact about not being able to place bids. At 13:32:46 PT users attempting to leave feedback on items received messages that it was not a valid transaction, though that message was not true. The site was stable for the rest of the day.

On 29 Dec at 08:12:22 PT sellers reported Turbo Lister was not accepting passwords, giving password invalid messages. There were also problems with the Turbo Lister downloads, the program indicated it needed a download, but then would not complete the download. The ebaY spyware toolbar was also reported not working, bringing up blank pages. The site was otherwise stable.

On 30 Dec at 06:38:53 PT users reported the feedback system was not working. At 10:20:24 PT users reported that PayPal was not working returning messages that the site was not available due to heavy traffic, Error 3004. At 10:53:32 PT category search was not working. Rather than being able to narrow a category search, the links took the buyer back to the main category page, preventing access to listings. This glitch was reported as fixed at 11:01:51 PT. At 16:20:36 PT search was not working in that subsequent pages of search results yielded messages saying, "We could not locate the page you requested. We are sorry, but the file you requested has moved or does not exist on our system. Please check the Site Map or the Home Page for the new location of the file you seek. Regards, eBay" At 22:41:04 PT sellers reported the revise function down, returning internal error messages.

On 31 Dec at 03:55:32 PT users reported gallery thumbnails coming up as red X's. At 07:11:04 PT users reported that ebaY had not indexed title search listings since 14:58 PT on 30 Dec. As of 08:48:10 PT the listings had still not updated, now 20 hours behind on indexing. At 12:05:08 PT the Turbo Lister update program was still broken, not allowing required updates, and at 14:17:54 PT, Turbo Lister went down. At 18:11:44 PT ebaY's email system went down, returning "Warning: Unable to send your question(s) Unfortunately, we were unable to send your question(s) to the eBay user via email." messages.

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