eBay issue tonight

[mario]

It looks like eBay had an issue tonight between 8pm PDT and 9pm PDT.

External monitoring sites seem to confirm this. Gixen was getting "503 service unavailable" responses from eBay servers during this time.

Both main and mirror servers were affected as issue was on eBay's side.

It also looks like some users' authorizations were abruptly invalidated, so some users were getting "INVALID AUTHORIZATION" status messages.

My apology to affected users, there was nothing Gixen could have done about this.

[Barrelhouse]

Thanks for the update, Mario!

Are you aware of what the specific issue might have been, and if there is anything to prevent it from blocking Gixen again? Or is it just something we're going to have to live with whenever the issue resurfaces?

[mario]

I don't know, except that it was an eBay issue. This is very rare - I don't even remember last time when this happened. There is nothing on Gixen's side that can be done to prevent this.

[Dylan79]

Thanks for the update, I wondered what happened as I missed an item that was way under my snipe.

[Gixen]

[Ey3388]

Yea eBay was down so it wasn’t about Gixen at all. I tried to go in to place a manual bid was obviously cannot load the site. I wonder if eBay will re-do those affected items because the final prices were way lower than what they should have gone for as no one could bid.

[underbridge]

I thought it was odd that I didn't get the usual "You've won the auction" email from eBay.
Luckily my initial bid won - the snipe was just in case anyone bid against me.

[MoonRocket]

Thank you for the clarification.
At underbridge's reply: Is it possible and/or recommended to schedule a snipe and bid manually at the same time, even from a secondary eBay account?

[Cupid]

It is certainly not recommended to bid from two different Ebay accounts, because that is very likely to inflate the auction price.

It's also counter productive to place a manual bid at or above your snipe amount, there is no point in sniping in such a case and Ebay would block the snipe if it's less than or equal to an existing bid from the same Ebay account anyway.

There are however still a few reasons why people might want to place low initial bids on an auction prior to scheduling a snipe. These include removing an existing Buy It Now option, especially if it's at a price above what you are willing to pay, or just to check that you are not blocked from bidding on that auction particularly if you've had issues with that seller before or been blocked from bidding on similar items in the past.
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Mark