Nearly Daylong Outage Plagues Online Auction House EBay
Popular online auction house EBay on Friday suffered an outage that lasted nearly a day, the latest and longest in a series of technical glitches that have plagued the Web site in the last month and that highlight the technical complexities inherent to cutting-edge technology and the burgeoning Internet.
In the last month, San Jose-based EBay, one of the Internet’s most significant electronic-commerce players, has suffered at least five significant unscheduled shutdowns. But its troubles are unusual only in their length and frequency in an industry that has struggled to cope with increasing loads that have surpassed even the most optimistic projections.
“Generally, EBay is really showing off what’s wrong with sites all over the Web,” said Cormac Foster, an analyst with Jupiter Communications, a new-media research firm.
EBay officials said the system was taken offline at 7:50 p.m. Thursday when the database server experienced problems. The company was not back online until 5:37 p.m. Friday. The problem was similar to one the company experienced Wednesday that resulted in a six-hour shutdown.
As a result of Friday’s outage, EBay refunded all fees for auctions active Thursday and Friday. It also extended by two days all auctions that were scheduled to end between the beginning of the blackout Thursday evening and 9 a.m. today.
EBay said the total cost of the outage will reduce revenue by $3 million to $5 million.
The company also announced changes in its policy regarding outages, including an automatic refund of all fees for auctions scheduled to end during a blackout that lasts more than two hours.
“This is a bump in the road, no doubt about it, and this is a big bump,” EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said. “We got kind of tossed out of our seats as we hit this bump today. We still remain confident in the scalability of our site.”
The company has been planning to build redundant systems that would handle situations like the ones this week, but that backup is several weeks away, Pursglove said.
The failures were unrelated to either high volumes or the recent revamping of the Web site, he said.
EBay stock fell $16.81, or 9%, on Friday to close at $165.88 on Nasdaq.
In the land-grab mentality of the Internet, being the first with a new feature or application is paramount, and testing for quality suffers, industry watchers say.
Most Web sites are essentially large software packages. But in the software world, publishers rigorously test their product before putting it on a retail shelf, knowing that the cost of recalling it or issuing bug fixes can be high.
Web sites, however, don’t permanently leave the company’s premises and can be tweaked continuously, leading to a mind-set that testing is not as important, Foster said. A recent Jupiter study showed that just more than half of all Web sites perform rigorous testing to account for high volumes.
Internet firms of all stripes have suffered from technical problems recently. Charles Schwab reportedly had six outages this year, including a 25-minute gap in April. E-Trade Group blamed a software upgrade for a two-hour service outage in February
“This is growing so quickly that the challenge is just to keep pace,” said Dan Burke, a senior analyst with Gomez Advisors who covers the online brokerage industry. “It’s hard for them to ramp up the infrastructure that they need, particularly when they keep on beating the growth forecasts every quarter.”
Even when a spike in business is expected, online ventures haven’t always handled it well.
Moviefone.com prepared to take orders for tickets to “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” by more than quadrupling its capacity, but the site still got hammered and crashed, said Laurie Orlov, an analyst with Forrester Research.
“They thought they were ready,” Orlov said. “They were wrong and got buried.”
To avoid similar blowups, Web sites will have to partner with hosting companies equipped to handle spikes in traffic, she said.
The Internet also gives greater visibility to a company’s computer failures. Previously, when a company’s systems were down, only the employees had to know about it. Now the world does.
How a company handles a failure can be as important as the failure itself. Amazon.com gave customers $5 gift certificates when they couldn’t place orders for a period last November.
“We get concerned here about anything that can undermine the confidence in e-commerce, and recurring problems have the potential to do it,” Amazon spokesman Bill Curry said. “Recurring problems at one place can come back to haunt us all.”
America Online, however, sits as an example of a consumer technology firm that faced relentless criticism for poor system performance and bounced back.
In December 1996, AOL switched from a metered access program, which charged members more for staying online longer, to a flat-fee structure, which provided unlimited access for $19.95. The network couldn’t handle the flood of new users taking advantage of the unlimited time online, leading to constant crashes and busy signals.
The fiasco led to an investigation by 45 states and a class-action lawsuit, both of which were settled last year. (It’s unclear how much AOL had to pay.)
Today, AOL continues to be the world’s largest Internet service provider, with more than 17 million members, more than double what it had before the blunder.
The relatively young Internet is trying to reach the maturity of other utilities upon which society relies. Flip a light switch and electricity pulses to the bulb. Turn a faucet and water flows from the spigot. Pick up the phone and a dial tone hums.
“We have to make sure that the Web tone, if you will, is just as reliable as the dial tone,” EBay’s Pursglove said. “We’ve invented an entirely new space on the Internet here, and there’s no one else to follow. We’re blazing a trail and doing it in volumes that no one else has done before.”
The medium is young and, for the most part, people have been tolerant of glitches. But that won’t last, analysts said.
“We’ve had experiences with good commerce situations on the Internet, and we know what it should be like,” Orlov said. “I’m not sure people who have had a bad experience on EBay, with all the auction sites out there now, won’t switch when they’ve had enough.”
According to a Jupiter survey in January, one-third of online users have switched Web sites either permanently or on a regular basis because the site they originally wanted to use had performance problems.
