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 the company was eager to spread the blame and offset some of the embarrassment by blaming the outage on its reliance on software from Sun Microsystems and Oracle. Ebay's site uses Sun Solaris and Oracle's server database. Particularly damning is the fact that eBay's Web site goes crashing down on a fairly regular basis. EBay is one of the most popular destinations on the Web, but the constant problems are causing customers to look elsewhere.
"We are sorry," wrote eBay CEO Meg Whittman in a letter to its users. "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.
