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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (18529)	8/7/1999 10:13:00 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

eBay Web site shuts down again BY MONUA JANAH Mercury News Staff Writer Online auction house eBay Inc.'s systems crashed again Friday, the latest in a string of outages to plague the San Jose company and irk its millions of users. Spokesman Kevin Pursglove attributed this shutdown to hardware and network problems. The site was taken down for regular weekly maintenance from midnight Thursday to 3.30 a.m. Friday. It was up until 4:20 a.m., when eBay's engineers detected hardware problems and ``we took the system down proactively,' Pursglove said. When the engineers tried to bring it up again, they couldn't connect the server to the Internet. The Web site, with nearly 2.6 million items up for sale, stayed down till late afternoon Friday, for a total of more than nine hours. The crash marked the fifth major shutdown for eBay since June. eBay isn't the only online company to have been hit by the failure of computer systems. E*Trade Group Inc. of Menlo Park, the online financial-services firm, Amazon.com, the Seattle-based retailer, and others have experienced embarrassing shutdowns. Observers say these companies have, to some degree, become the victims of their own success. The more that online auctions, stock trading and retail boom, the more the underlying software, hardware and networking equipment are pushed to their limits. And some of these companies have very limited backup for their systems. eBay runs its online auction system on a Sun Microsystems Inc. 64-processor computer, one of the biggest and most powerful servers available. Because of the phenomenal popularity of eBay's auctions, though, the machine has to process very heavy trading volume -- the company handles an average of 600 bids a minute, according to Pursglove. The site has 1.16 million visitors a day, and 5.6 million registered users as of last quarter. eBay installed a so-called ``warm backup' for its system just two weeks ago, Pursglove said, but the engineers weren't yet sure that they could rely on it. In any case, the network problem meant that the backup system wouldn't have been able to function either. A warm backup system saves all the data if a primary server fails, and can generally be up and running in a couple of hours. A ``hot backup,' which eBay has said will be operational in the next few months, takes over instantly in case the primary system fails. eBay's stock dropped $9.62, or 10 percent, Friday to close at $83.25.