EBAY ACCESS PROBLEMS

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Posted By: Jim Clarke

***A Message from Bill Cobb***
Date: 05/10/05 Time: 03:07:00 PM PDT


To Our Community:
To put it mildly, yesterday evening was not a pretty time on eBay…

Last night eBay’s global marketplace was affected by a power outage at our primary hosting provider’s facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. As if that wasn’t enough, in a completely unrelated incident, the PayPal site went down between 9:13 pm and 9:41 pm Pacific time. On behalf of everyone at eBay and PayPal, I want to apologize for both incidents and give an update on what happened as well as what we’re doing to minimize the impact of these events on our Community.

Regarding the eBay outage, our hosting facility’s power was disrupted for about an hour and a half, starting at 7:33 pm Pacific time. This power interruption caused the eBay outage. Immediately following the outage, eBay’s operations team focused on two priorities: working with our partner to restore power as quickly as possible, and activating our failover system. Before our failover system was operational, power returned to the primary system and we immediately began restoring listings and site functions.

eBay’s category structure is randomly distributed across 21 databases to manage eBay’s large amount of inventory. Depending on which database hosted your listing, it was impacted in one of two ways:


Access to the first group of listings was restored at 9:15 pm – listings scheduled to close between 7:33 pm and 11:15 pm (the outage period plus a two-hour courtesy window) will be credited all fees.

The second group was restored at 10:10 pm – the listings in this group that were scheduled to close from 7:33 pm to 12:10 am this morning (the outage period plus a two-hour courtesy window) have been extended for 24 hours, with all fees credited.
While the ability to view and bid on the first group of listings was interrupted by the outage, the listings themselves continued as scheduled and unfortunately, we’re unable to extend live listings without causing further disruption to those items. In keeping with eBay’s outage policy, we credited all fees.

The second group of listings was simply down during the outage period. We were able to extend these listings by 24 hours and credit fees in accordance with our outage policy.

The PayPal incident was caused by a hardware failure in our Denver data center. PayPal’s backup systems took over as they were designed to do, and the site was functioning normally after a brief disruption.

We understand that any site interruption impacts you and again, we sincerely apologize. While we believe eBay and PayPal have the best people and technology available, the fact is that sometimes events take place that are beyond our control. Rest assured we are reviewing both situations and working to continually improve our emergency processes.

We’re all working to come up with ways to make up for letting you down yesterday. Stay tuned.

As always, please feel free to email me at billcobb@ebay.com.

Sincerely,

Bill Cobb
President
eBay North America