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eBay - Staying Online - Always"eBay's persistent site failures stem from a lack of coordinated IT planning and a centralized database and storage structure that creates a single point of failure." - Internetweek.com, January 11, 2001. The ProblemsIn January 2001, eBay, the largest online auctioneer in the world, saw a major outage of its website, which lasted 11 hours. Company sources blamed the mishap on some problems with the storage hardware and database software. eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, blamed both the primary and backup infrastructure of the website. To add to the company's problems, it had to delay replacing some of its hardware due to the busy holiday season.
Experts said that eBay had failed to build a redundant storage hardware and scalable web architecture. They added that eBay had been functioning largely as a marketing-driven company, which placed far more importance on adding new features2 rather than having a core infrastructure to avoid outages. Background NoteeBay's founder Pierre Omidyar (Omidyar) felt that an Internet auction site could create a highly efficient market. The idea seemed to have originated out of the difficulty that his fiancee faced while trying to collect Pez dispensers from the San Francisco Bay area. Omidyar launched Auction Web (the site's domain name was ebay.com) in September 1995 to enable people to trade.
1] Deutsche Banc Alex Brown analyst Jeetil Patel. |
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