eBay outage blamed on software from Sun and Oracle

Online auction mega-site eBay was offline for over 24 hours this weekend,causing an estimated $2-3 million loss of business for the company. But thecompany was eager to spread the blame and offset some of the embarrassmentby blaming the outage on its reliance on software from Sun Microsystems andOracle. Ebay's site uses Sun Solaris and Oracle's server database.Particularly damning is the fact that eBay's Web site goes crashing down ona fairly regular basis. EBay is one of the most popular destinations on theWeb, but the constant problems are causing customers to look elsewhere.

"We are sorry," wrote eBay CEO Meg Whittman in a letter to its users. "Weknow that you expect uninterrupted service from eBay. We believe that thisis reasonable, and we know we haven't lived up to your expectations. We wantto earn back your trust that we'll provide you with this level of service.