At 4.20am Pacific Daylight Time on Friday August 6 1999, eBay Inc’s servers crashed for the fifth time since June 10. The beleaguered auction web site has blamed hardware from Sun Microsystems Inc for past technical difficulties, and when the site came back up at 12.55pm, hardware failure was again named as the culprit. The issues causing the outage were corrected, engineers reported, the system was then rebooted, and both the primary and the backup databases were up and functional. However, at the time of this rebooting, the site encountered network anomalies that have presented access to the site. Wired News was the first to speculate that eBay’s domain name server (DNS) might be at fault.
Founded on Labor Day in September 1995, the online auctioneer has mushroomed to the point where patrons offer some 2.5 million items for sale and place tens of millions of bids per day. Some estimates place the monthly hit rate as high as 1.5 billion. Others have compared the amount of content on the site to the entire world wide web in 1994. Every instance of downtime, however, hammers the publicly traded company’s stock price and imperils the businesses that have sprung up to exploit its services.
