Headline Feeds
Online auctioneer eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) 
suffered a series of Web site
outages on Sunday, including a glitch in the clothing and jewelry categories lasting
more than nine hours.
Site visitors could not view or bid on items in the clothing and accessories category and the jewelry, gems and watches category between 10:55 a.m. and 8:07 p.m. PDT.
"[Due to] the nature of the business, keeping its site
up and running 24/7 is more important to eBay than it
is to, say, Amazon,"
Morningstar.com analyst David
Kathman told the E-Commerce Times.
In addition, site registrants were unable to access eBay's "View Account" feature for on Sunday from 6:05 a.m. to 6:45 a.m. PDT.
Damage Control
For much of the nine-hour outage, would-be sellers could not list items or update item descriptions in these two categories.
"We understand the frustration that any system issue causes our user," eBay said, apologizing for the inconvenience the outage caused.
Since viewing and bidding were unavailable for more than two hours, eBay said it would credit all associated fees and extend all listings scheduled to end between 10:55 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. PDT on Sunday, in accordance with its outage policy.
Up and Down
Following a comprehensive hardware upgrade in early 2001, eBay had experienced only minor site hiccups -- claiming 99.9 percent uptime -- until March 2002.
Last month, the company endured a 90 minute outage that prevented access to some pages but spared the bidding system, according to published reports.
A few days later, some users experienced problems downloading graphics from eBay's site, reports stated.
Hosting Help
Mindful of the importance of site uptime, eBay announced last week a site hosting agreement with Intel Online Services, a division of Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC)
The announcement came shortly after eBay said in its
annual report, filed with the
U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC), that all its Web hosting
facilities are concentrated in three West Coast locations, operated by Exodus Communications,
Qwest Communications (NYSE: Q) and Sprint (NYSE: FON) .
Possible Harm
"We have experienced periodic system interruptions, which we believe will continue to occur from time to time," the filing said. "Any failure to expand or upgrade our systems at least as fast as the growth in demand for capacity could cause the Web site to become unstable and possibly cease to operate for periods of time. Unscheduled downtime could harm our business."
EBay's 42 million users will not experience
disruptions as the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) Online hosting program goes
into effect, according to company spokesperson Kevin
Pursglove.
"The arrangement with Intel will complement eBay's existing hosting facilities," Pursglove told the E-Commerce Times. "This means there are now additional and diversified hosting capabilities, ensuring eBay users continued site access."
Going Wide
The Intel Online Services deal is part of eBay's larger strategy to diversify its hosting options, said Pursglove.
"If they want to keep growing, they'll have to constantly be upgrading infrastructure -- and diversifying their hosting seems to be a good step in that direction," said Kathman.
"The more spread out their servers are, the less
chance there is for a single disruption to take down
the whole site," he concluded.
