Ebay down for hours, users left in the lurch

It happens to every website at one time or another, something will ‘break' and people will be unable to visit. For Ebay however, log in issues have huge ramifications.

Today, since around 7am UK time, Ebay has been experiencing log in issues which has left many people thinking their accounts have been hacked. Instead of presenting the user with a ‘maintenance' message, users have been presented with a ‘user id or password error'. Threads like this one on Yahoo answers have been appearing online over the last 3-4 hours.

Generally this would seem a mere inconvenience, however there are many businesses online who rely on Ebay to generate revenue.

While being unable to list products is a huge inconvenience, there are thousands of auctions ending this morning. With people unable to log in and bid, auction sale prices will be much lower than they should be – for example if you bid £10 yesterday on a product worth several hundred you could end up with a bargain. Not such a good deal for a seller however.

Many people are already complaining on our Facebook page that their auctions had 60 or more watchers and the auctions ended this morning with an initial bid placed yesterday. Auction sniping at the last minute has been impossible this morning.

Understandably, sellers will not want to ship goods at bargain prices due to ebay issues, but it goes without question that buyers could leave negative feedback on the seller account if they don't ship, causing huge issues for an account standing.

Ebay have experienced downtime before, but this has been a longer outage than any we can remember. The company reputation is always questioned by a portion of the user base, but the lack of a mere holding page to alert to potential issues seems like such a basic procedure to miss. Will ebay alert their user base or hold the clock time to compensate for inaccessibility or will buyers end up with thousands of bargains this morning?

We could log in again just before 12pm today, so hopefully it is the start of the ‘fix'.

Kitguru says: Another complete mess from ebay, but really it isn't that surprising considering the fiasco's in the past.

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