EBay Back After 22-Hour Glitch
All systems are go on eBay, the popular online auction site, after bidding was suspended for nearly an entire day due to a computer breakdown.
The outage happened when the so-called "personal trading community" with more than three million users in 50 countries struggled to rebuild a corrupted computer server.
Bidding stopped Thursday night and didn't begin again until Friday, some 22 hours later.
EBay is the world's largest online auction site, with more than 2 million items listed at any time. In an average minute on eBay, more than 150 new items are listed, 500 bids are placed and seven new people register. Its Web site receives more than 600 million hits a month.
The stoppage, which came after eBay tried to launch a revamped version of its site, disrupted bidding on millions of collectibles and curios.
After the site returned, a message from company founder Pierre Omidyar and chief executive officer Meg Whitman promised a new backup system that would limit future outages to no more than an hour.
Auctions also were extended by two days and the company said it would refund fees for all active auctions from Thursday and Friday.
"We are sorry," the message said. "We know that you expect uninterrupted service from eBay. We believe that this is reasonable, and we know we haven't lived up to your expectations."
The outage was unrelated to the Worm.Explore.Zip computer bug, which began infecting systems across the country this week.
Apologies weren't worth much to Sharon Doney in Severn, Md., who is trying to raise $250,000 through online auctions of records and books to cover medical bills for her failing liver.
"This is frustrating," she said. "Say you were at a real auction and the auctioneer just walked away for a while. It just doesn't work."
Doney said that problems on eBay short crashes, slowdowns and postponed auction endings during the past few months have already prompted her to branch out into other auction sites, including eBay competitors Amazon.com and Yahoo!
One of eBay's worst previous outages, which lasted about six hours, prevented the company from holding auctions of just-released merchandise tied to the latest "Star Wars" movie.
Andrew Bartels, senior research analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group, said outages should be expected: "This is still new technology and these high transaction sites will periodically go down."
Bartels said that eBay traders have less to lose than online stock brokers, who have also experienced site crashes in recent weeks.