eBay faces hefty compensation bill after website crashes following pre-Christmas surge

The eBay website crashed over the weekend following a surge in the number of items for sale. The technical issue resulted from a huge increase in live listings as sellers ramped up for Christmas. Millions of online shoppers were left unable to search for items on the website following the computer system failure. Yesterday, eBay said it had restored the search function after the glitch led to searches returning either limited or no results throughout Saturday. The global e-commerce and payments company said it has more than 200million live listing - 33 per cent more than at this time a year ago. The technical issue, once identified, was easily fixed and implemented across the site's servers on Saturday afternoon and evening, eBay said. But the firm could be left with a hefty bill to compensate sellers for losses caused by the outage. A spokesman for the eBay told the Financial Times: 'Rest assured that we will assess the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230222/eBay-faces-hefty-compensation-website-crashes-following-major-pre-Christmas-surge-listings.html#ixzz0XhZiUhLc