eBay App Stops Working Tuesday Afternoon, Frustrating Buyers and Sellers

If you didn’t generate as many sales on eBay as you were expecting on Tuesday, it could have been due to the fact that buyers and sellers were unable to complete tasks on the eBay app on Tuesday afternoon. eBay noted the following problem at 1:33 pm on its pinned thread on the Technical Issues board:

“Listing does not show the images and other item details in eBay apps on both Android and IOS devices (October 25, 2023) – Reference ID: ALERT15039.”

eBay also reported the outage on its System Status announcement board, which continued to display a red warning for “Buying” and “Selling” functions on Tuesday evening.

Buyers and sellers turned to Down Detector and social media to report the issues they were experiencing.

When a buyer asked eBay at 2:18 pm on Twitter what was going on with the app because nothing was loading, the AskeBay account responded that eBay was currently experiencing issues with the app, “but our IT team is aware and working hard to fix it. We hope this will be resolved soon!” The customer indicated he was trying to win an auction.

At 3:18 pm, a user asked eBay on Twitter how it planned to compensate all of the sellers who had auctions ending during the app outage and, “now because of your issues have lost out on a lot of money because no one can access eBay to bid!!!!”

An eBay moderator responded at 4:48 pm with the tweet, “We appreciate your patience while we work to repair the root cause of this app based technical error. While this is a high priority fix, it’s important to note that the bug did not affect all eBay app users.”

Down Detector also noted the problem, which showed a peak in reports at about 3:08 pm.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.