eBay experienced a 90-minute outage on Thursday, its first major technical glitch in more than a year. Many static pages on the Site were unavailable, including eBay's home page. eBay technicians were looking into the cause of the outage that lasted from 13:10 PST to 14:40 PST.
No announcement of refunds has been made by eBay. According to their policy, a hard outage occurs when no one can bid as a result of unscheduled system downtime. What remains to be seen is whether or not eBay will consider this a hard outage, since selling and bidding functions were still available on the Site, but only for users who new the direct URLs to these pages. If eBay does consider this a hard outage, according to their guidelines, eBay will credit all associated fees for affected listings. See
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-extn.html for more information on eBay's outage policy.
In January of 2001, eBay suffered a major outage lasting more than 10 hours. eBay also had a major outage in June of 1999 that spanned 22 hours, causing the stock price to tumble. Maynard Webb, president of eBay Technologies, said in December that the eBay site achieved 99.9% accessibility in Q3 2001 when it supported 250 million page views per day and sent out more than 1.2 giga-bits of data per second during peak usage.
