[mario]

In the past 2 hours there was a database issue on the main server that caused many snipes to fail. The message most users will see will indicate a timeout (or "auction ended"), but the underlying cause was runaway database process that caused the main server to start excessively swapping and slowed it down to a crawl.

The issue is resolved now. My sincere apology to all affected users.

Snipes on mirror server were not affected by this.