According to CNBC E-Bay crashed early this morning and is still crashed. This is just days after E-Bay's CEO said on national tv that a serious crash would "not happen again." At that time the CEO discussed a "warm-backup" system that would limit any future crash to 2 to 3 hours. E-Bay's spokesman, when asked why the warm backup failed said, "That's the $64,000 question." They still haven't given an explanation for the crash. According to CNBC, E-Bay said it started as a hardware problem and later became or included a network problem.

These days it seems that you can run from the Titanic metaphor, but you just can't hide.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), August 06, 1999

Answers

Ebay's network performance has mirrored its stock performance lately:

-- Alan Greenspan (HMFIC@frb.fed.org), August 06, 1999.

Ebay goes down for maintenance every Friday morning between 12:00- 4:00AM PDT. It is now 2:00 PDT and they are just starting to come back up.Probably another hour or two if nothing else happens.

Now why would you link this to Y2K ? Just because they have a full staff on duty and are familiar with the programs and the maintainance and are still down for 10 hours.

So does that mean that millions of other computers that have programs the programmers may not be familiar with, working under pressure with power surges, brownouts and/or blackouts won't get it all fixed over the holiday weekend?

I wouldn't want to bet the farm on it !

On the way to buy more tuna.

-- sue (deco100@aol.com), August 06, 1999.

If eBay can't keep their system up before Y2K, how well will they do after the rollover? All large systems depend on a dedicated staff of oncall programmers, network administrators, and operators to keep them running. When Y2K starts throwing multiple monkey-wrenches into the systems, those people will find themselves overwhelmed. Disaster will follow.

-- Mr. Adequate (mr@adequate.com), August 06, 1999.

Diane Squires should send some of the smart-mouth "we can fix any problem in, oh, 2 or 3 hours, pollies to eBay.

My concern has been outages like eBay's hitting thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of production systems.

If it happens, and every day, it looks more certain that it will, it won't be fixed in oh, 2 or 3 hours. Some of these failures will persist for months. Some very large companies will close their doors.

We'll see. Take care everyone, pollies and everyone else.

-- cory (kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net), August 06, 1999.

Since they are a growing company, something probably got hosed when they tried to add capacity. Or they got hacked. Or...

How this relates to Y2K is that some problems cannot be solved simply by rebooting. And that things don't necessarily get fixed in 15 minutes just because management wishes to "make it so," whether or not jumping up and down and screaming is perceived as additional incentive to get a problem fixed pronto.

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftAndIntelSuck.com), August 07, 1999.