eBay Crashes on Saturday (EBAY)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is having an issue which may have just cost sellers millions and millions of dollars in untold profits today.  After doing random searches today on Christmas present purchases and with eBay being one of the online destinations, it was suddenly clear that something was wrong on eBay.  The system was not working if you did not already have your item numbers known.  Search functions yielded nothing and stores were out.  If this were to happen after midnight on a Tuesday, it might not matter.  But this outage is on a weekend day when so many buyers and sellers aren’t at work and are able to spend the effort to go eBaying.

A technical support chat only yielded “Due to the great number of visitors currently using the system, your request cannot currently be dealt with. Please try again later.”

A call into support just has the message “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties with search and the ability to access stores….”

Whether this lasts or not is unknown, but even the most common searched words yield “0 results found for _____” and “We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.”

The reality is that this does happen from time to time on the web.  But when you see how the entire system is down for search and for stores, it is just proof that there are not enough redundancies.  Or worse.

JON C. OGG
November 21, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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