eBay users began complaining Sunday night that their auctions were not showing up on eBay's search results. Typically it takes several hours for an item to show up once a seller has listed the item, but by Monday, users said the index time was lagging by about 15 hours.

Several times every day, eBay cycles through the auctions listed and gets information on new listings, high bid, current number of bids, etc., and adds this information to the database that users use to search the marketplace. Until the listing is included in the index, a potential bidder has no way of knowing of the auction's existence.

Late Monday morning, eBay's announcement board carried a message about the problem: "Title and Title and Description Search is currently 5-10 hours behind in indexing new items. We expect all items to be indexed within normal indexing times by tonight."

eBay introduced 1-day auctions in mid-October. Previously sellers were limited to 3-, 5-, 7- and 10-day auctions.