Recently a serious disruption corrupted ebay’s search function, rendering the site unusable. We regret the occurence of this mishap, not because it happened but because it affected all sellers equally. We apologize for this inadvertent, level playing field.

Initially, we had intended to make full restitution for this most unforgivable of errors. However our legal team stopped us dead in our tracks by pointing out that if this search interruption is actionable as a breach of conduct, then so is a Best Match search sort.

Furthermore, there is no way to grant amnesty to sellers during the blackout without actually admitting that a harsh punishment structure is actually in place, aimed at seller’s heads, to begin with.

Lastly we cannot explain why reducing a seller’s item visibility thus garnering one or two bids is legal and permissible some of the time, but not all of the time.

But in keeping with our policy of uttering something glib and childish as opposed to something anyone can actually use, we offer the following:

“Dear Buyer:

Recently ebay asked sellers to shave concentric circles in the shape of target practice into the backs of our heads. They spoke, and we’ve listened.

“We are cancelling your lone bid and thus the unbelievable deal you bagged with us, in the naive belief that you won’t buy something else from us and nuke us off the face of God’s green earth as a result.

“We know you will be overjoyed at the process of re-bidding and thus, experiencing those windorphins yet again- not to mention pumping ebay’s all-important page count, which doubtless wn’t be revised to account for all the F5′s and page refreshes confused buyers did that day. All day.

“If you have any questions about this or any other means to threaten our very existence, don’t hesitate to use My Messages to contact me with offers of 1-2 DSR’s, negative feedback or Item Not Described filings. Please be aware that for your protection, the My Messages system screens all pre-sale communication with sellers, allowing thru only those messages from buyers who have sucessfully extorted in the past. Sincerely,

e***e”

I never received the email from eBay about the site outage even though I had 40 auctions close on Saturday!

I did receive 2 letters about the 50% off sale. The first one did not have a space between my first name and last name which is very strange and has never happened before.

Both of these letters from eBay were not sent to my email address either which all letters to my messages are supposed to be and have bean for the last 11 years.

Further investigation into this fiasco over the weekend is in order it goes a lot deeper than an outage. I believe the whole sites security is at risk.

Especially since they do not have any one from their code monkey department working on the weekends from the reports that came out of support. There should definitely be grounds for a class action law suit but it would have to be started by a good legal team and not some hacks.

Bill