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To: Radim Parchansky who wrote (62086)	6/12/1999 10:54:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

FOCUS-eBay's online auction site down for 22 hours (Adds site coming back up, comments from company and customers) By Andrea Orr PALO ALTO, Calif., June 11 (Reuters) - In one of the worst Internet outages, the online auction house eBay <EBAY.O> went down for close to a full day on Friday, infuriating many loyal customers and raising questions about the technological underpinnings of the popular site. Millions of eBay members were blocked from bidding or posting items for sale, as eBay engineers working to correct the problem repeatedly promised to have the site back up shortly, only to back peddle and say it would take longer than initially thought. eBay's stock was the biggest declining issue on NASDAQ Friday, falling $16.81 to close at $165.88. The auction site, which had also gone down earlier in the week, crashed again on Thursday night and stayed down for about 22 hours. When service was restored Friday evening, the eBay chat room was flooded with comments from customers, many of whom said they were growing tired of the repeated glitches. Although Friday's outage was by far the worst in the company's short history, it has been beset by a series of smaller glitches over the past year. "There really is no excuse for so many problems other than poor management," remarked one eBay customer. Other comments included "eBay needs to get its act together," and "What does the E in eBay stand for? It could be error." A few customers said they had switched to the auction site run by Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>, one of a number of companies that have launched an auction business to capture a piece of the enormous online person-to-person trading industry that was pioneered by eBay. But others said they would stick with eBay, which had the best assortment of merchandise by far. A spokesman for eBay said the problem resulted from a failure in the software that was used to list items for sale and update bids. He insisted it was not a problem with the site being strained to capacity, and said it was not clear why it had failed at this particular point. "Scalability is not the problem," said spokesman Kevin Pursglove. "We are built to expand our capacity 30 to 40 percent at any given time." Still, the length of time of the outage exposed some of the company's technological shortcomings, including the lack of a backup system. "We have been working on this system for many months and it is almost ready," the company said in a note of apology to customers. "Sadly, if we had this system in place a few days ago, we might have avoided this outage." The company said it would extend auctions interrupted by the crash, offer refunds, and waive listing fees sometime in July to make up for the inconvenience. eBay has expanded at a breakneck pace over the past year, growing from a relatively tight-knit community service to one that has 3.8 million regular users, and a multi-billion dollar stock valuation that has made it one of the highest-profile companies on Wall Street. "Any company that is growing as fast as eBay has grown is bound to run into some technical glitches," said Andrea Williams, an Internet analyst at E*Offering. She added that this particular outage was "longer than usual."