Andale suffered a major outage on Tuesday that stretched over a 16-hour period. Auction sellers who use Andale's services to list and manage auctions on eBay and other online marketplaces were particularly upset because the outage occurred during the busy holiday sales season. One angry seller said winning buyers of closing auctions were receiving blank email instead of invoices. The outage also sparked angry comments from users on the Andale support boards.

Andale CEO Munjal Shah said Wednesday morning that the site was taken down Monday night to fix database speed issues that were occurring over the past few weekends. The fix was not initially successful due to a bug in the database software. However, Shah said they isolated the issues that caused the speed issues, and the site is now running faster than it has in 2 months.

"We would not have attempted a change this large, were it not for the system problems on Sundays during peak loads," Shah said. Auction-related sites and services try to avoid implementing any changes to their systems this time of year because of the holiday sales period. eBay recently announced it is in a "Quiet Period" until the end of December in an attempt to avoid technical problems.

Shah apologized in an announcement to Andale users. He said the company will add people to their IT team, and have already ordered additional servers and machines.

All buyers affected by the outage will be notified that the problem was Andale's, and not the seller's. Andale will also extend or add a second free listing day in addition to the one the company already planned to conduct due to a Denial of Service attack against the site last month. Shah said that Andale would, "try hard to make sure one occurs before the holiday selling season."

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