eBay on Sunday confirmed that a "technical issue" had caused search queries on the auction site to be messed up over the weekend, resulting in limited or no search results. The company says that it's being cautious, though, and is holding back on some advanced search features until the issue is fully solved.
"We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today," a post on the company's eBay Ink blog read Sunday. "As part of our effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for sellers and for buyers, we have kept some secondary search features temporarily offline. This includes refining search by certain item specifics, such as color or clothing size, and having Store Inventory Format results included in the main search results."
In a statement, eBay also said the technical issue was caused by "a surge in live listings as sellers ramp up for the holiday season. eBay currently has more than 200 million live listings, 33 percent more than at this time a year ago."
Some eBay members still weren't satisfied with the explanation. "I had a one day auction ending today, (and) no one was obviously able to bid on it because they couldn't search for it," one commenter said on the eBay Ink blog. "Will I get a credit for this?"
"eBay should credit all sellers with active listings during this time," another said. "These issues have cost sellers many bids and sales. Once again eBay is screwing sellers."
Much like Twitter's today, outages at eBay were rather prominent in the company's early days. They're not too frequent anymore. But this one came at a time when there are some sentiments of malaise among eBay sellers, some of whom use the auction site to make a living, and when it also faces increased competition in the e-commerce sector.
An analyst release from JP Morgan Chase said that it did not anticipate the outage would have an effect on eBay's fourth-quarter earnings. But, it contained a warning: "Although we recognize it is virtually impossible for a site of this complexity to not encounter occasional issues," the report from analyst Imran Khan read, "we continue to believe that eBay needs to make greater investments in the robustness and functionality of its site in order to remain competitive within the e-commerce space."
Update: 11:05 p.m. Monday: To note that the site was down most of Monday.
The Pirate Bay was inaccessible most of the day Monday after a group representing copyright owners forced the BitTorrent search engine's bandwidth provider to cut off service, according to a published report.
NForce, the Pirate Bay's latest Internet service provider, complied with a request to shut off service to The Pirate Bay made by Netherlands-based antipiracy group Brein, according to online news site Tweakers.net.
Monday's outage followed a three-hour blackout of The Pirate Bay on Friday. The blackouts are the result of work performed by attorneys based in Sweden who are employed by the big movie studios, according to my film industry sources. The lawyers are hunting down whoever provides bandwidth to The Pirate Bay and then using the threat of lawsuits to pressure the ISPs to stop.
Black Internet, the Pirate Bay's onetime ISP, was threatened with fines in Sweden unless it cut off service. The Pirate Bay then moved to an a Ukrainian ISP, which also received threats, according to the blog TorrentFreak. NForce was next and now that company has had to comply.
Just where The Pirate Bay will go next or how long the site will be down isn't clear. The founders of the site have vowed to continue operating the site no matter what.
The Pirate Bay was down across the U.S. for at least three hours on Friday, an outage that comes as the site's latest bandwidth provider comes under pressure from entertainment companies.
CNET noted that the site was down at 1:22 p.m. PDT but appeared to come back up at 4:50 p.m. PDT. The cause for the blackout was unclear. Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of The Pirate Bay's co-founders did not respond to interview requests.
The Pirate Bay founders: Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm
(Credit: The Pirate Bay)The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent search engine loved by file sharers but loathed by many copyright owners, has had trouble in the past few months with its Internet service providers. The most recent example came on Thursday night when a Ukrainian ISP cut off service to the site after receiving legal threats from copyright owners, according to the blog TorrentFreak.
The Pirate Bay was operational Friday morning so Enigmax from TorrentFreak speculated the search engine likely had a substitute provider ready to go. It's possible there were technical issues involved with the switchover.
The Pirate Bay was forced to look for a new ISP after a Swedish court, at the request of the trade groups representing the music and film industries, threatened The Pirate Bay's former ISP provider with fines unless it stopped servicing the site.
Earlier on Friday, Google stopped indexing The Pirate Bay but later acknowledged it booted the site from its search results by mistake.
After two Twitter outages this week, the service is encountering another issue Wednesday afternoon as many users are reporting they can get to the microblogging site, but their feeds are not being updated.
Although users could add updates to the site, their tweets were not apparent to others on the site, according to several users contacted by CNET News, as well as our experience here in the newsroom.
The problems seem to have begun around 4 p.m. PDT. There is nothing to indicate that the site has suffered anything similar to the denial-of-service attack that knocked the site offline for an extended period last week.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
PayPal suffered a global outage and slow performance Monday, but eBay said its online payment system is mostly back in working order.
"About an hour ago, PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money. We have all hands on deck to get this fixed," said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar in a blog post about noon PDT. "We're really sorry for the inconvenience."
An update at 12:40 p.m. said the site was working again for most users.
Nayar said in an interview the outage was global and the worst of the outage lasted about an hour total, though the site wasn't fully recovered just before 2 p.m. PDT.
$2,000 per second in transactions
The outage could be costly for those who rely on PayPal to handle e-commerce transactions. PayPal says about $2,000 in payments per second flows through the system, meaning that a one-hour outage would cut out about $7.2 million in commerce.
Nayar declined to comment immediately about whether sellers would be compensated in any way or how eBay handled such decisions in the past.
As a key driver of growth for eBay, PayPal is becoming more important at the online commerce and auction site.
"PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay," eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said in July. And through a developer release in July of a new PayPal payment system, eBay wants to refashion the service to enable a new generation of online commerce.
PayPal's developer site said the outage hit not just its Web page, but also through PayPal's application programming interface (API), which lets applications use the service without having to go through the Web site. It first noted the problem at 10:41 a.m. PDT.
Updated with more details at 2:04 p.m. PDT.
Tenants of the Fisher Plaza data center carry servers out of the building Friday morning. The building houses the Bing Travel servers, among others.
(Credit: TechFlash )Update at 3:30 p.m. PDT July 4: Power was restored to Fisher Plaza early Saturday morning with back-up generators, and many sites are back online, including Bing Travel, according to TechFlash.
Update at 4:51 p.m. PDT July 3 The fire's start time and a statement from Fisher Communications were added.
An electrical fire at downtown Seattle's Fisher Plaza has interrupted service at a long roster of Web sites, including Microsoft's Bing Travel and Authorize.net.
Fisher Communications said in statement Friday that the problems at the Fisher Plaza data center started in a garage-level electrical room at approximately 11:10 p.m. Thursday night. Fisher said the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Some of the affected sites put up messages explaining what had happened. "The blown transformer knocked out power to the entire building, which is home to the Bing Travel servers," a message on Bing Travel said. "This is isolated to Bing Travel only, and there is no impact to any other aspect of Bing."
Bing Travel said it's working hard to restore service, and set 5 p.m. PDT Friday as the target time for resumption of service (it did not meet that goal). "In the meantime, you may use Microsoft travel partner Orbitz for your travel needs," the site said.
TechFlash reporter Todd Bishop has arrived on the scene and is posting updates.
Bishop notes that this isn't the first outage at the Fisher Plaza data center--service went offline last year as well after an electrical fire. The Fisher Plaza Web site also was down as of this writing, but a cached version says:
Fisher Plaza is the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest combining Class A office, data center, colocation, and retail space with 21st century communications and media services.
"Pretty frustrating," writes one TechFlash poster. "I understand problems happen, but this the second time in a year that we have had to explain to our customers about an outage. This is supposed to be a 'world class' facility. Brings up a lot of questions that are still unanswered from the last outage."
Among other sites impacted--see Kyle Mulka's blog for a list of affected sites and their current status--online real estate service Redfin suffered an outage last night, but was back up Friday morning, according to TechFlash. Fisher Plaza is also home to Seattle's KOMO-TV and KOMONews.com, which reports that the server farm fire also impacted television and radio broadcasts. As a result, KOMO Radio and KOMO-TV are broadcasting Friday from remote locations.
Verizon Communications spokesman Jon Davies said the fire also temporarily disrupted Verizon's Seattle-area DSL service. About 50,000 customers in Oregon and Washington lost Internet connectivity, Davies told TechFlash.
On Friday afternoon, Fisher said it's bringing in electrical generators to restore power to the building, at which time it can further assess the situation. "The company is working to restore normal service to its customers as soon as possible," Fisher said.
MotherJones was yet another site taken down by the fire. Others: Big Fish Games, Dotster, Tom's of Maine.
Editor's note: Check CNET News' separate story for details about what caused the outage for Google and others.
Google tweeted at about 10:20 a.m. PDT its problems are fixed.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Many people found Google's search site was extremely slow or inaccessible Thursday, and other reports pointed to troubles with other properties including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense, and Blogger.
Judging by a Twitter search for #googlefail, the problem was international in scope, though it wasn't immediately clear how universal the problems were. Google didn't immediately comment for this story, though it did confirm an earlier Google News outage that lasted about three and a half hours.
Google is central to the online lives--and livelihood--of many, and an outage shows exactly how central it's become--and not just through its primary business, search.
"The Internet dies without Google. Can't get to my bank Web site because it's waiting on 'google-analytics.com.' This is made of lame," said Twitter user Tadiera.
Are you having problems? Tell us what's not working and where you live in the comment section below.
Updated 9:30 a.m. PDT: Many readers are reporting that service is returning to normal, at least on some parts of the East Coast. Please continue to let us know if you are experiencing problems, or how long the outage lasted for you if things have settled down.
Google representatives have still not returned calls and e-mails requesting comment on exactly what happened this morning. The company has confirmed, however, that Gmail suffered what it called "a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users." Google said it hoped to update that status by 10 a.m. PDT.
This is all that a usually instant search for 'Bruins' showed after 10 seconds. Click to enlarge.
(Credit: Screenshot by Zoe Slocum/CNET)Updated 9:40 a.m. PDT: Google released the following statement: "We're aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We're looking into it, and we'll update everyone soon." Google also sounded the all-clear whistle for Gmail: "The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support."
Meanwhile, outages have been reported to us all over the world, including California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Florida, New York, Washington, Illinois, Idaho, Indiana, Arizona, Oklahoma, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, the United Kingdom, Dominican Republic, and Malaysia.
Keynote's Internet Health report is showing some interesting data this morning as well. Two network routes involving NTT, a Japanese telecommunications giant, are showing significant packet loss on connections to Qwest and Verizon. We're trying to get more information and an explanation from Keynote representatives.
Updated 9:50 a.m. PDT: Our colleague Larry Dignan over at ZDNet notes this report from Just Ping, backing up other reports of significant packet loss on the Internet today.
A Just Ping report involving Google.com shows packet loss around the world Thursday.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Updated 12:25 p.m. PDT: Google gave a brief explanation of the problem on its main blog:
Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.
An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.
Editors' note: Besides the Google News outage, there have been problems affecting other Google sites as well. Click here for the latest on those widespread Google outages. In addition, this story was corrected at 11:30 a.m. PDT to reflect that YouTube videos already had been available, but now are spotlighted as a part of a broader Google News facelift.
Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning. But when it re-emerged, it sported newly prominent news videos hosted at YouTube.
Some news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player with a news video. Although the videos had been present before, Google is calling attention to them with the new logo as part of a facelift launched Thursday, spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said.
YouTube news videos now are prominent up on Google News.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Johnson said the videos are drawn from Google partners in the YouTube news channel.
Another change at Google News Thursday includes the addition of photos and images on the section pages devoted to topics such as Sci/Tech, World, and Business.
Thursday's changes followed another batch a week ago that added more heft to the "cluster" pages that show when you click on the "all 1,000 news articles" link that shows beneath groups of related headlines. Those earlier changes included images, excerpted quotations, sections that organize headlines by geography, and a section for blog headlines.
The greater attention to YouTube move not only increases the profile of video news within Google News, but also potentially increases the incentive for news organizations to work with YouTube. And it makes Google News more of a hub for news consumption, rather than just a mechanism for referring readers and viewers to other sites.
Some prominent media executives have been attacking Google, asserting it benefits more from professionally produced content than it gives back. Google argues that it sends billions of readers to news sites through Google News, whose results are sometimes blended into the main Google search results as well.
Earlier this year, Google began showing paid advertisements on Google News, too, when people perform searches.
Google News may be influential, but it's not perfect. The site was down Thursday morning for users in Boston, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Texas, and Sarasota, Fla., but worked for one user in London. One CNET News reader reported that the outage began at least at 5:50 a.m. PDT; service appeared to return for people between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. PDT.
Google confirmed the outage.
"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users from approximately 3:30 a.m. until around 7 a.m. Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved," the company said in a statement. "We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously. We apologize to those users who were affected."
Twitter search, which can be a useful gauge of whether a problem with a Web site outage is widespread, showed many other reports as well.
Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)News on YouTube itself isn't new; YouTube has a news channel, and Google has been encouraging citizen journalists to add their own content.
And YouTube, of course, is a force to be reckoned with in online video. Of the 9.5 billion video streams delivered online in the U.S. during April, 5.5 billion of them, or 58 percent, were through YouTube, according to statistics from Nielsen Online on Thursday. And while online video stream delivery overall in April grew 24 percent year over year, it grew 36 percent for YouTube--meaning that it's not only large, but it's also gaining share.
However, Hulu, which hosts video from NBC, Fox, and now Disney, is growing faster, Nielsen said. It's in second place with 373,000 streams delivered in April, or 4 percent share, but its year-over-year growth was 490 percent, Nielsen said.
Google's instant-messaging service suffered intermittent outages Monday, behaving inconsistently for several hours.
The issue began about 10:30 a.m. PST and affected a subset of users of both the Web page-based Gmail Chat and the installed Google Talk software, spokesman Andrew Kovacs said. Because of the problem, sometimes when people sent a message they'd get an error message it wasn't sent and the recipient didn't receive it, but often resending the message worked, he said.
"This issue has been resolved for most users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next couple of hours," Kovacs said about three hours after the problem began.
Google's core business is in search and advertising, but it's trying to expand to be a fuller-featured Internet destination with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, which collectively are offered to paying customers as Google Apps subscriptions. Google offers a service level agreement to those customers.
Netflix suffered a nearly hour long site outage on Monday, the company confirmed.
The site went down at about 3:40 p.m. PT and Netflix posted this note to the site's front door at about 4 p.m.:
"We're sorry, the Netflix website is temporarily unavailable. Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual. And you can still instantly watch movies via your Netflix ready device."
Netflix has suffered several costly outages in the past year. A hardware glitch prevented the company from shipping DVDs to customers for several days in August. A malfunction at the company in March also delayed shipments.
In what is likely an unrelated event, some users of the Netflix Player by Roku have complained for two weeks of receiving dramatically inferior video quality in the movies Netflix streams via the Roku box. Roku executives told me they suspect the source of the problem is Netflix's content distribution network (CDN). Netflix's Swasey said the company is investigating.
