EBay Eases Outrage Over Outage

Online auction juggernaut EBay is backing off from its initial finger-pointing at Sun Microsystem’s software for last week’s marathon outage. “We initially thought it was, but that is not clear at the present,” EBay Vice President Steve Westly said. “Sun has been about the best partner we could have had.” His comments came hours after Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy said Sun’s StarFire servers and operating system software at the San Jose company were “fine.” “There are a lot of issues, for Sun and EBay, that are better left unsaid,” McNealy said during the company’s annual convention for programmers in Sun’s Java language. Westly said that EBay is investigating whether a software “patch” that was easily available might have averted the outage. The glitch is expected to cost EBay millions of dollars in revenue, and it helped wipe out billions of dollars in the company’s stock value.