At best the explanation is simply the tip of the iceberg. Look below the surface and the root cause of the system wide outage becomes apparent.

If the ‘listing surge’ had anything to do with bringing eBay down, it was not because of the volume of listings, it was because eBay had been tinkering with search for the previous two weeks.

eBay had been tinkering with Best Match as well as changing code to take eBay stores back out of search. Additionally, eBay added code to display similar items on sellers listing pages, making yet another major change out of cycle. These code tweaks likely caused the search function to become unstable, so when listing volume grew, the system collapsed.

Thus, the cause was not a surge in listings, the cause of the collapse was incompetent management forcing system changes to be implemented on the fly without regard for the havoc those changes would have on the stability of the system.

Incompetent management at eBay promised not to make major changes during the holiday season, and promised to limit system and policy changes to twice a year. This was done for obvious reasons which were well illustrated by the system wide outage that brought eBay sales to a virtual halt right before the holiday season. If only eBay management had kept their word regarding no changes during the holiday season, than a system wide outage could have been averted.

If this disaster does not illustrate why sellers have been screaming about incompetent management at eBay and motivate the Board of Directors to change the management team, then nothing will.

When management is this dishonest with the public over a system wide failure, then it is no wonder that buyers and sellers have lost confidence is eBay as a marketplace.

eBay sales have been in steady decline for the past year. The cause of this decline is – and continues to be – the failure of eBay management to make improvements that actually benefits buyers and sellers.

If John Donahoes’ destructive innovation was benefiting buyers and sellers in any way, sales – not listings – would be growing.

Sales are obviously not growing as evidenced by eBay’s last 12 months.

Having lots of inventory on the shelves does not drive sales.

Sales are driven by happy shoppers, and eBay’s management team has never understood who their most active shoppers are, instead they choose to treat them as if they were a disposable and replaceable commodity.

Management disregard for eBay’s most active customers is the reason eBay continues to fail. Unless and until there is a management change at eBay, this trend will not turn around, only customers will.

For a seller, losing an entire day of not having products show up in the search results is a killer. I am unemployed and eBay is my only source of income. Several of my auctions ended that night (some without success and others with extremely low bids since no one could locate them). If someone was “watching” my merchandise, then they were in luck and had the opportunity to grab a bargain!

Again, I’ll be curious how ebay handles this mishap and reimburses sellers.