eBay problems started with a little glitch in the morning then became a major outage around Saturday noontime. eBay Search is down -- outage left sellers and buyers worried. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of users were frustrated when they found eBay's search down through Saturday. Still at this hour, searches for anything I tried ("junk," "antique," "television") all returned the error message: We were unable to run the search you entered. Please try again in a few minutes.
Saturday typically accounts for a relatively smaller share of eBay's weekly sales (11%), but this time of year - with only about 5 weeks to go until Christmas - is an incredibly inopportune time for the auction and ecommerce site to sacrifice any potential business.
At 11:17 am PST, eBay posted an announcement that it was experiencing "some issues with a delay in search being displayed."
Here is the latest update from ebay (6:12 pm EST) regarding this recent eBay outage:
If you use the Advanced Search option at the top of the page, and type in your search query and click the title and description box and then run the search, the results for the title and description search will be returned. Likewise, if you receive a 0 resultspage for title search and choose the title and description box and re-run the search, you'll see the appropriate results.
Does eBay think buyers are going to first of all, find this announcement, and second of all, follow these convoluted instructions? Surely eBay is not paving the way to get out of calling it an outage?
