Irate eBay Users Demand Downtime Compensation

Following a major global Internet outage that affected many popular sites earlier this week, users of one such service affected - eBay - are starting to demand action from the e-commerce site's owners to make up for their disruption.

Many have taken to social media channels to vent their anger and demand compensation from eBay.

The outage hit early on Tuesday morning, and lasted through until the afternoon, with eBay's UK Twitter account claimed it was sorted at 13:30, Tweeting, "All eBay sites are working normally and we are sorry for the inconvenience."

Users disagreed, though - and it may have taken longer to iron out the problem for some, as the first reply to this post (from @CrazyCakes_UK) read: "Mine's not!!!! I am a seller who has lost money all morning! Gggrrrr please fix it."

And there are lots of folks who have complained about lost bids and sales, and are demanding that eBay look into some sort of compensation (and throwing in some liberal use of Caps Lock).

Demands For Compensation

@dparker224 raised the point that customers paid for a service not provided, posting on Twitter: "ebay has been down all over the uk, ive had auctions end and lost hundreds, WE DEMAND COMPENSATION AS YOU DEMAND MONEY FROM US."

@maximus_andy tweeted: "I'm looking forward to the compensation you are going to pay me for all this lost business! SORT IT OUT EBAY!"

@TomFletchBB tweeted: "ALL customers....No announcement from @eBay_UK and I imagine no compensation for lost sales for business sellers. Business as usual."

And there were plenty more tweets where they came from – yet there's still been no announcement from eBay on the issue. Given that the downtime was a prolonged affair, you might rightly expect some response, particularly if your auctions came to a close on Tuesday (as was obviously the case with quite a few folks).

It's hardly the first outage eBay has suffered from in recent times, either. In fact, it's the tenth this year, and there was an hour-long downtime back at the end of June.

In fairness to eBay, though, this particular incident hit other websites (and other eBay sites aside from the UK one), with it apparently being an Internet-wide issue pertaining to overflowing numbers of IPv4 addresses... although the fact still remains that eBay users paid for a service and are unfairly out of pocket if their auctions were hosed by the downtime.