Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/06/14/our_favourite_ebay_error_messages/

Our favourite eBay error messages

Sorry seems to be the easiest word

By Tim Richardson

Posted in On-Prem, 14th June 1999 12:51 GMT

There are times when saying sorry is simply not enough -—just ask the poor beleaguered customers at eBay. They know that saying sorry all the time for the same mistakes soon begins to wear thin and lose all meaning. For the online auction house bombed again last week and remained down for part of the weekend. Believed to be one of the worst outages on record and one customer who stands to loose up to £2000 a day is reported to have said it was a personal "disaster". Yet scanning eBay's announcement board over the last five days is like reading the personal diary of someone whose life is falling apart and sliding further and further into a world of despair. Full Throttle "We are experiencing problems with our servers," it read on Thursday evening. "CGI is currently down, as well as the database server. This will cause error messages while performing most functions on our site. Our Engineering staff is on this full throttle, and we will update you as we get more information." But such optimism did not last long. "We are sorry," read an entry on Friday. "We know that you expect uninterrupted service from eBay. "We believe that this is reasonable, and we know we haven't lived up to your expectations. "We want to earn back your trust that we'll provide you with this level of service." For technicians at eBay, sorry, it seems, isn't the hardest word -- it's just one they seem to use a lot. ®