eBay's search engine experienced a major outage on Thursday. Reports surfaced on an eBay discussion board at 11:47 PDT from users who were unable to get any results to their searches. At 1:15 pm, eBay reported the problem resolved.
eBay made no mention of its outage policy that states, "In the event of a title search outage of one or more hours, eBay automatically credits all associated fees for affected listings." An inquiry to eBay's Public Relations department about whether it would issue credits to listings affected by the glitch was not returned.
Thursday's search glitch followed hard on the heels of another glitch that affected "Title and Description" searches in which regular Title searches did work. eBay did say it would issue credits for that glitch, but only if sellers reported specific listings and only after eBay confirmed each one affected.
Some sellers are reporting a seemingly unrelated glitch in which the "Free Shipping" icon is displayed in their listings when it should not.