EBay's online auction house was offline Wednesday, its second failure in a week.
The problem was caused by a bug in third-party software, eBay told users. A failed upgrade of the same Veritas software, used to manage eBay's data storage system, caused a 14-hour blackout on Monday.
"It's the same problem from Monday," said Jennifer Chu, an eBay spokeswoman. "We thought it was fixed but it was apparently just temporarily fixed."
The two failures have led some eBay users to wonder what technical constraints the company is encountering.
"Why are they performing maintenance on a live system?" asked Mark Crosten, an eBay user. "Why don't they have redundant systems in place?"
The system went down around 2:55 a.m. PST Wednesday, and was still down as of 8:30 a.m.
"[The vendor] has confirmed that there is a bug and they are working on it right now," the company told users over an administrative message board.
Another eBay user, who asked not to be named, said the problem began Tuesday afternoon when system performance was so slow it was nearly impossible to use.
"It was only at the end of the day -- perhaps 5 or 6 p.m. EST, that eBay finally acknowledged what we had been telling them all day," the user said in an e-mail. "Since the evening hours bring the heaviest traffic, the situation grew worse and worse."
Several users have reported that when they posted complaints about the performance, their negative messages were deleted from eBay's online message board.
According to eBay, the slowness of the system was a result of a bug in Veritas' software. The company could not estimate when the system will resume trading.
