eBay in the wars
In a statement Sunday, the company, which has been plagued with outages since June 9, said My eBay, its personalised service for registered members, was "still disabled due to instability with that [search] function. At this time, we have no ETA on when it will return."
The latest glitch was announced at 11:57 a.m. PT Sunday, only hours after eBay's engineering department got the site back on its feet at 2:25 a.m. PT. "We were reluctant to disable a feature which is so popular with our community, but we hope you understand the need to do this until we are satisfied that it will not cause any further system difficulties," the statement said.
Service for some 2 million auctions was restored Friday at 5:37 PM PT, but repairs continued Saturday as the company pushed to restore the site to its condition before a site revamp was put in place last week.
The title search function was also delayed on Saturday morning, according to a notice on eBay. "Engineering is working on changes that must be implemented due to bringing back the previous site," the statement said. "As soon as that is completed, a new update will be started. We expect Search to be updated this afternoon. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience experienced. We truly appreciate your patience and understanding."
eBay does not believe the problems have anything to do with demand issues or the redesign put online this week, but said the new interface and improvements have been "backed out" of the system just in case, eBay told users Saturday.
In a letter of apology, eBay CEO Meg Whitman said the service will refund seller fees and offer free listings next month.