Power Sellers Unite

psunite · Joined: 27 Jan 2005 Posts: 6213 Location: Columbus OH

The online marketplace has experienced outages in the past, notably a 22 hour shutdown that cost the company heavily.

This most recent outage, a result of a problem at eBay's hosting facility in San Francisco, resulted in about a two to three hour unavailability last night.

eBay posted two messages about the outage on a backup server. One dated Monday night announced the power outage at a principal hosting facility. Some site functions were not restored right away.

A second announcement discussed the impact of the outage in a little more detail. The company referenced its outage policy there as well, noting ten-day auctions would be credited a .40-cent fee.

eBay says its listings reside on 21 databases, and two separate groups of databases were out for varying periods of time. eBay said listings affected by the outages would be extended and fees credited.

As of press time, the site appeared to be functioning normally with no problems observed. orginal article

Ebay outage policy

PattyPooh · Joined: 21 Feb 2005 Posts: 682

Glad to hear what it was. Since Feb. 18 I have not listed anything there, but, since the cupboard was getting bare, :) I listed 4 things. Last night, I went to check on them and was told all my data was unavailable...in big, red print! I thought they had suspended me on general principles :lol:

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17242 Location: Texas

Now I'm not defending ebay or any other site that goes down for a time--Many sites have shut down for a spell due to upgrades, power outages or major scammers--Not sure what ebay's problem was and did not know about it until I read it here--I still list on ebay mainly due to the amount of traffic the site generates on a daily basis--I think they are based in CA so Arnold might have turned off the ole electricity for a bit to save some serious $$--Ebay is back up and running and still sound as ever so life as many of us know it is back to normal-->elgato

BigfootDepot · Joined: 27 Apr 2005 Posts: 916 Location: Northwest Ohio

Posted this on another BB ...............

Well now y'all .......... I may just be a country bumpkin that don't know the difference between a cow chip and a memory chip

BUT

I find that something like this could happen to be totally beyond the realm of a solid business plan and/or disater recovery plan.

If you are in a business where you take orders, fill those orders and then ship those orders, you can probably live with an occassional outage that could possibly last for several hours, recover, and not lose too much business. Most likely none of those people that wanted to place an order needed it within the next day anyway, so no big deal.

On the other hand ................

If you are dealing with a business whose sole income is derived from activity occuring on the servers, whose business is providing a service on those servers, activity that is very TIME DEPENDENT, activity that may not be able to wait 2-3 minutes, let alone 2-3 hours ....... to allow something like this is totally irresponsible on management's part. While people's lives are not a stake, as with an air traffic control system, millions of peoples livelyhoods and businesses ARE dependent on the uptime of eBay.

IMHO - eBay's servers (apparently at a host site) should have a mirror backup maintained at all times, on a server that is not local to the primary server. Given that the present servers are in Bay area ......... what are the chances that there will be an earthquake in that area that will knock out power for an extended period of time ?? Bill Cobb, in his apology, states that " .... 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. " The power outage lasted for over 2 1/2 hours. This tells me that if there is a major disaster in the Bay area and power and/or communications is lost, it will be at least 3 hours before eBay is up and running again ... best case scenario. The backup server should not be local to the primary, since an earthquake could wipe out power to both places at the same time.

I am also very curious what Bill means when he says "Immediately following the outage, eBay's operations team focused on two priorities: working with our partner to restore power as quickly as possible,". Does eBay have electricians on staff they sent over to this place to help out?? If that is true, why doesn't the company hosting the server have these types of people available? Or did eBay send over 1,000 squirrels in cages with little wheels to turn to generate electricity for the servers :lol:

I would love to hear the head of IT, Finanace, Meg, Bill or anyone else at eBay try and justify why there is no immediate failover system in place for just such an occurence. I'm sure the almighty $$ has something to do with it.

God help us if eBay does take over the air traffic management of this country. :oops:

brandnew · Joined: 08 Apr 2005 Posts: 235 Location: ~Moscow~

This really made me think that is ebay worth all the money im paying to sell and all this stuff happens.I can understand if auction sites like tam,bidville,low income site breaking down but not a rich site like ebay,