The eBay Outage

The eBay Outage

There was a major outage at eBay, the online auctioneer, this week. It lasted over 24 hours and followed a couple of other shorter problems. CNET carried an article (link below) about the outrage and righteous indignation from people who sell stuff on the site. They were talking about moving their business to other locations, like Yahoo or Amazon. They were even talking about (now don't giggle) circulating a petition!

I can just see Marge, sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by an overstock of salt and pepper shakers, saying to her husband, "I know, Vern. Let's start a petition to make them stop those nasty outages!"

These poor souls are missing an important point of the digital age, and they better learn it fast. Computers and systems DO fail. Sometimes magnificently. Databases crash. Communications lines do go down. There are going to be very few instances where systems stay up all the time, particularly where we are on the cutting edge of technology, like ecommerce. We've gotten spoiled by things like the phone system. Getting your dial tone has a long history (for the most part) of reliability (except for my wireless company...but we won't get into that). The reason they're reliable is that they've had decades to work out the kinks. And they roll out new systems slowly, limiting failures to a smaller impact. With ecommerce, you can't do that. You have one big honking system, like eBay, and it's going to go down once in a while.

Some companies have uptime goals of as much as 99.99% uptime, which translates into about 1 hour per year of downtime (assuming a 7x24 operation). However, few organizations get that close. Viruses, sabotage, database and software problems, power failures, Internet problems, facility problems, and outright stupidity can cause an interruption. So expecting computers to be up 100% of the time is naive.

High Availability has become industry jargon for this whole problem and it isn't just eBay's responsibility...it's the users' as well. Frankly, if the you're silly enough to quit your day job and devote your entire livelihood to the uptime of ONE system, over which you have no control or significant influence, then you shouldn't whine about it when it goes down once in a while. You have to expect it and prepare for it. The nice thing about the Internet is that there are other options. Don't send petitions to ebay. Develop some fault tolerance of your own - create your own site to sell your stuff or use other auction houses.

And if you're expecting everything to be perfect when you move your entire operation to another auction site, you're really living in fantasyland. They may go down too. Technology ain't perfect. Deal with it.

Links to stories:

The outraged users

The completel story

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