eBay posted on its Announcement board a message about the technical difficulties that have been plaguing Andale since Friday, reported in AuctionBytes on Monday (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m10/i31/s03.) Andale provides free counters to eBay users as part of an exclusive contract with eBay that expires next year (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y03/m06/i04/s01).

eBay linked to a message from Andale's Senior Vice President of Customer Operations, who said the issue was due to a bug in the vendor software it utilizes for its database (http://corp.andale.com/x-outage.html).

On Tuesday evening, eBay updated its announcement and offered sellers advice on communicating with buyers, and it pointed sellers to its own listing tools "to list items while Andale's service remains unavailable" (http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200511011831421.html).

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200511011134501.html