This and other news to surely bring AOL down under 86 in coming days!
Sunday June 13 3:19 PM ET
eBay Second Quarter To Take Hit From Outage
SAN JOSE, Calif. (Reuters) - Online auction house eBay Inc. said second quarter revenues will be
about $3 million to $5 million lower on the fallout from a nearly 22 hour outage on its Internet site
Friday.
EBay said a failure in software from Sun Microsystems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW - news) caused its service to go down
Thursday. The site returned to service at 1725 PDT Friday.
EBay said it would extend auctions scheduled to expire during the outage by 48 hours and would refund all fees for all
auctions between June 9 and June 11.
The outage, extensions and refunds are expected to lower second quarter earnings by $3 million to $5 million, the
company said in a statement released late Friday.
Analysts expected second quarter earnings of 5 cents per share for the company, which made its public debut in
September 1998, compared with 2 cents a share a year ago, according to First Call Corp.
''We know we must provide continuous service for our community, and that we have let our community down,'' said Meg
Whitman, eBay's president and chief executive. ''We will not rest until we make sure that this problem will not occur again
and that we make things right for our users.''
Friday's outage was the worst in the company's short history and drove the stock to close down $16.81 at $165.88 on the
Nasdaq Friday.
EBay said as a result of the outage, it implemented a new policy for unscheduled outages of two hours or more. In those
cases, eBay said it will extend by 24 hours all auctions that would have ended during or one hour after the outage and will
automatically refund all fees for those auctions.
''Although we know that extending auctions and refunding money will never be enough, we feel that this new policy
illustrates our commitment to our community,'' Whitman said.
EBay said it believes all information and data on the site is secure and no data was lost during the outage.
An eBay spokesman said Friday a failure in the software used to list items for sale and update bids caused the service to
crash. EBay later said the software is provided by Sun.
''We will continue to devote the best technical and service resources of Sun Microsystems to ensure the level of service
the eBay community demands,'' said Ed Zander, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems. |
