eBay Servers Go Down--Again

Users of the eBay auction site continued their trail of tears yesterday as the e-commerce site suffered another series of server problems, resulting in several hours of downtime.

eBay's CGI servers--which run the search capability crucial to online sellers and bidders--were taken offline for a total of about six hours yesterday, making it nearly impossible for electronic purchases to take place. The CGI servers also caused problems earlier this month.

“I hope eBay gets its act together soon,” said one eBay seller.

Phone calls to several eBay spokespeople were not returned. The company has never issued a statement as to the cause of the repeated server failures, but sources attributed the outage earlier this month to a problem with the Sun Solaris software that runs the eBay site. A patch that would have repaired the problem was never installed, the sources said.

Although eBay has consistently declined to discuss the nature of its server problems, observers said the company is still suffering because its site architects underestimated the heavy traffic load that it would generate. High-availability servers that would have provided redundancy during the outages still have not been deployed.

“CGI servers generate a lot of looped communications. There is a lot more back-and-forth [between user and server] than in a static Web site,” said Acuitive Inc. analyst Jared Berglund. “The traffic can be tough to handle.”

After the outage of June 14 and 15, eBay CEO Meg Whitman promised to improve the site's hardware, staffing and performance standards. “Our goal is uninterrupted service, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” she said.

Yet, less than a week later, eBay's IT department reported problems with spiking CGI traffic. E-mail servers also had to be taken offline for repair, and the site was taken down for maintenance for four hours on June 27.

Another prescheduled four-hour maintenance session took the site offline early yesterday, and later that morning, search and bidding functions went down unexpectedly for about two hours. E-mail functions were also unavailable.

eBay has extended many of its auctions for one hour or more following its outages, but it did not refund fees paid by sellers, as it did during the longer outage earlier this month. The company has not provided a timeframe for fixing its server problems, though it is testing the new high-availability site.