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Technology Stocks : eBay - Superb Internet Business Model -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.L. Reagan who wrote (6738)	1/4/2001 6:05:01 PM
From: A.L. Reagan	Respond to of 7772

Tech problems crash eBay WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- The online trading and auction company eBay.com was down for nearly 11 hours Wednesday because of technical problems, the company's Web site said Thursday. The San Jose, Calif.-based company said "a series of failures" affected its primary and backup computer systems. The crash "was compounded by a decision to delay the replacement of certain hardware components in an effort to avoid disrupting service during the busy holiday season. While we have known for a while that a potential problem existed in our shared disk hardware, we chose to delay the recommended upgrade because we had developed a serious of work-arounds that had previously proven effective." Those "work-arounds" began to fail at about 11:34 a.m. PST Wednesday, eBay said. The company experienced a "hardware failure on our backup system. As we restarted the back-up system, another problem developed in the storage system shared by the primary and back-up systems, effectively bringing down the site." A third back-up system later ran for about 40 minutes before it began experiencing problems. The company said all auctions scheduled to end between 11:34 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. PST Wednesday were extended for 24 hours, and fees charged during that time would be refunded. The site's previous major outage occurred in August 1999, eBay said, adding that it has "invested considerably in our technology infrastructure" since that time. "For the last four quarters, we have demonstrated greater than 99 percent uptime," the company said. "During this period, the backup systems have performed without incident." The company said it expected to upgrade its hardware components within a few weeks, and would probably be down about six hours "during a low-traffic time" to make the changes. Within four months, eBay said, it would distribute its database to a number of separate servers to "isolate any failure to a limited part of the site." (c) 2001 UPI All rights reserved.