An update to the ebay outage, it is still down. Just to keep you all up to speed, ebay had been feverishly doing code or system changes to the site, no doubt to prepare for the holiday season and possibly support all the big time retailers who they are bringing on to the site. 11/18/09 08:57AM PST/PT Scheduled maintenance from approximately 23:00 PT (11pm) on Thursday, November 19th to 01:00 PT (1am) on Friday, November 20th. During this maintenance period, certain eBay site features may be intermittently unavailable or slow. This is normal in that they always use that for their weekly but hmm 11/21/09 earliest siting was at 5am PST where small business reported not being able to access red door icon (to the store). Others confirmed this later others were seeing that they could not access "view items" from within a listing. Delays, delays, delays. Then the error messages began for buyers who were performing shopping searches -------------- November 21, 2009 | 11:17AM PST/PT ***Original: Slowness in Search Results*** We are experiencing some issues with a delay in search being displayed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing. We are working to get this resolved as quickly as possible. Regards, eBay http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200911211117051.html ----------- Auctionbytes shows some of the screen shots consumers would see http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2009/11/1258839253.html ------------ Then they finally responded and identified it 01:37PM PST/PT ***Updated: Issues with Search results and eBay Stores*** Due to errors in some of our backend systems, members may be seeing different errors in Search. This could be that "We were unable to run the search results you entered. Please try again in a few minutes" or a blank page, or simply the browser being unable to display the page. This is also affecting the ability to access eBay Stores through search directly, and sometimes from the store URL. Please note that we are working as quickly as possible to get this resolved. Thank you for your patience as we continue to work to resolve this. http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200911211336411.html --------------------- Then this pathetic workaround. As if the buyer is even going to see this? Sheesh, you go to the homepage and type in a search and it says ZERO RESULTS. November 21, 2009 | 03:28PM PST/PT ***Issues with Search results and eBay Stores*** Due to errors in some of our backend systems, members may be seeing different errors in Search. This could be that "We were unable to run the search results you entered. Please try again in a few minutes" or a blank page, or simply the browser being unable to display the page. This is also affecting the ability to access eBay Stores through search directly, and sometimes from the store URL. Workarounds - Buy It Now Search and Advanced Search 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. Alternatively, if you receive a 0 results page for title search and click the Buy It Now tab (or choose the title and description box and re-run the search), you'll see the (Buy It Now or title and description) results for your search query. Please note that we are working as quickly as possible to get this resolved. Thank you for your patience as we continue to work to resolve this. http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200911211528031.html ------------------------------------- It is November 21, 2009 6:40PM PST, between 5 hours from when ebay pulled their head out of their butt and possible 13 hours if you go by the first sign of trouble --------------------- Search Down : http://tinyurl.com/ycfuqcc Sellers businesses impacted: http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum/Ebay-Stores/21 http://forums.ebay.com/db2/forum/Seller-Central/143 Small Businesses are impacted, While this site is down, ebay is still collecting listing fees and not informing small businesses that their own site is down. Ebay has a history of not wanting to give any refunds, they like to play it off as nothing. The last time when a refund was due to sellers, ebay said they would issue refunds and then it took a news write to find out that ebay decided they would not. Ebay shouldn't have been tinkering with the site so close to the holiday. Maybe if they planned this out then this would not have happened. As of this writing, ebay is still not supporting users on the community boards. The community that ebay so greatly said was the heart of its site. Many of us believe that with ebays eagerness to redo their site to make it look spiffy to compete with the likes of retailers like Amazon, that their were asleep at the wheel. I personally believe that once Maynard Webb left, that these search problems began. And they have a trait that looks very much like disappearing/reappearing listings that many of us experienced. Ebay blew that off too and many small businesses were left with no means to recover their listings. If you are reading this and you are writing about this problem, please make it a point to get some confirmation about what are they going to do to compensate these small businesses and what are they going to do to implement an effective schedule and communciation procedure. Thank you!