Online auction giant eBay today said an undetermined number of its customers – buyers and sellers – around the world experienced “intermittent technical issues” that disrupted some of the $200-million-per-day transactions beginning at 12:01pm Sunday.
As of 10pm Monday, when most services were restored, eBay offered no explanation for the outage and did not respond to inquiries from San Jose Inside.
Cybersecurity firm Vecert, based in Florida, reported Sunday that “a coordinated offensive has been detected against the global infrastructure of eBay, one of the giants of e-commerce.”
“The hacktivist group 313 Team (Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq) has claimed responsibility for a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that has rendered critical platform services inoperable.”
Vecert reported that it found “massive spikes in outage reports, confirming the disruption of [eBay’s] backend systems.”
“The group claims to be employing rapid fire assault tactics, designed to intermittently saturate network resources, thereby hindering mitigation efforts by eBay's IT teams.”
Vecert warned “the DDoS attack may serve as a prelude to a financial extortion demand to halt the malicious traffic. The use of high-power botnets—such as Beamed—is testing the limits of e-commerce resilience.”
“We’re aware that some customers have been experiencing intermittent technical issues since Sunday on parts of the eBay platform,” the company posted on its “Community” page. The post was timed at 11:09am Monday, but didn’t appear in response to many inquiries until after 9pm Pacific Time. “We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this.”
The company statement promised it would protect its sellers by removing any negative feedback from customers and any repercussions for seller ratings because of interruptions to auctions and direct sales.
“If you had an auction end after April 26 at 12:01pm Pacific Time, which you feel was impacted, you have the option to cancel the order and we will protect your seller performance and refund associated selling ad fees,” eBay told its sellers today – although many could not access the site to read the message utility after 10pm Monday.
It was impossible to estimate the breadth or impact of the outages for eBay, whose 19 million sellers serve roughly 135 million active buyers, more than 30% in the U.S., according to industry data.
Website tracking companies DownDetector.com and IsItDownRightNow.com both reported eBay’s primary site ebay.com was down Sunday afternoon and evening and most of Monday.
“Ebay.com is DOWN for everyone,” IsItDownRightNow reported Monday. “It is not just you. The server is not responding.”
Many customers who tried to search for items on eBay earlier Monday received a “Pardon Our Interruption” message: “As you were browsing eBay, something about your browser made us think you were a bot.”
Early Monday evening, many customers connecting to ebay.com for hours saw only this message on their computer or smart phone screens: “Where's all the stuff? Our homepage is down, but the rest of eBay is fine. We'll have it back up in a moment.”
