eBay Glitch Hits Homepage, Category Pages
eBay is currently experiencing a tech issue impacting loading of the site's homepage, other important category and navigational pages, leaving users in the lurch.
When logged in, the homepage only shows suggestions & cars saved in a user's My Garage & in incognito, it only shows the page header & footer.
Attempting to navigate through the category links doesn't provide better results.
Either no items are loaded at all:
Or the page only displays a few items in promotional carousel modules.
Unsurprisingly, the eBay system status page shows no disruption to Home Page, but does show a disruption in Sign-In.
However, eBay community staff have already proactively posted in the forums to inform users eBay is aware of the outage and working on a fix.
While the homepage issue is the only current one that has been acknowledged, users are reporting a host of other problems sitewide today.
Is anyone else experiencing severe stability issues with the website today? I tried to change the pricing on a listing and it kept showing a page not found error.
It would not load my seller dashboard and when it finally did load the listing and allowed me to make changes, it literally wiped all the other details when I hit submit and then flagged the listing because it was missing item specifics. Now as I'm trying to make some more changes, webpages just hang updating and it's showing the page not found error again.
Here we go again, Item specifics are being deleted when trying to list items along with "system errors". Took four tries to upload items.
Having the same issue, but also, it's auto changing our shipping business policies to a parcel select method with no international shipping. And will not allow us to select a different business policy. PLEASE FIX ASAP.
eBay has been testing a new homepage design, which may possibly be related to the recent increase in page loading and other errors.
Liz Morton
This current problem is just the latest in a long line of continued technical misexecution at eBay that includes disappearing descriptions, duplicated listings, and incorrect item specifics added; listings completely disappearing, orders reverting to old invalid addresses causing chaos for buyers and sellers and far too many other examples to name here.
Liz Morton
eBay announced a mass layoff of ~1,000 employees in January including over 100 software engineers in California alone, leading to seller concerns about site stability and use of AI for critical support functions.
The increasing occurrence of serious, business impacting technical issues on the site brings to mind another period in eBay's history that saw sellers, media, and even activist investors take executive leadership to task for their technical misexecution.
Ex-CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are "unacceptable" and really pissed him off.
There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?
Here's the simple answer - unacceptable, unacceptable. And we're making a lot of changes. When you make changes there are times that things happen but that's not an excuse and it's not ok with me and this summer in particular there have been a number of issues that directly impacted sellers like people not being able to see their view counts and a few other things and it's just not ok.
I'm extremely proud of a lot of things we've done, I'm not proud of that and in fact I hold my team accountable and it's not important, it's an internal matter but, we made changes to people and teams because shipping product that isn't ready is not ok. It's not ok with me and it's not ok with my team.
So the short answer is it's not like we don't get it. We are making a lot of changes and I want to make those changes, we need to make those changes, but making changes and then having to back up and fix things is not cool and I totally get it. Most of the issues from this summer have now been remedied but I was pissed off.
Those glitches and other executive failures caught the attention of activist investor Elliott Management, resulting in a very public letter calling for substantial changes in their proposed Enhancing eBay plan (emphasis mine).
...As an online marketplace that provides a critical forum for millions of buyers and sellers, the efficient and effective functioning of the platform is paramount. Unfortunately, eBay has been plagued by technical problems and operational challenges for years...
...Fast forward to recent years and the platform still faces issues. In 2018, eBay sellers complained about countless technical issues including incorrect billing, lost photos, warped titles and many others. On this month’s end of year podcast, eBay senior management apologized to sellers and admitted, “This is a 2018 that we don’t want to repeat on a number of levels. And the technology issues that we have had with the platform is top of the list.”
We agree: The consistent reliability of the platform is central to eBay’s success, and management must do all that it takes to achieve it.
While innovative endeavors in new pursuits like machine learning and augmented reality are promising future technologies, eBay’s publicly touted initiatives in these areas will add little value if the core platform continues to have critical functionality failures.
Current eBay Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh, who was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig.
He was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2019, after a brief period where he co-led Core Product & Tech along with Mohan Patt when Steve Fisher was being shuffled from CTO to SVP Payments "in order to focus on a personal matter."
Five years later and very little has changed - eBay is still plagued by technical problems and operational challenges and management is certainly not doing "all that it takes" to achieve consistent reliability of the platform.
It's far past time for the board to get serious about demanding technical excellence from the executive leadership team and if they won't, investors should make their feelings on the matter known at next month's annual shareholders meeting.
