Whether you are using it as a side-line or as a fulltime business, eBay has opened up the ecommerce world for hundreds of thousands of people across the world. But what happens when our reliable friend eBay becomes a little less reliable? Unfortunately last week eBay suffered its 11 th outage of the year which was (rather more unfortunately) also on their 19 th Birthday.What impact was felt by the eBay community? The answer is simple....lots! The family of sellers were unable to go about the business of listing, relisting and pulling off the details for shipping their goods. And perhaps even more problematic was that buyers, for approximately 4 hours, were unable to part with their hard earned money.Is this normal or should we expect more? eBay seem to be having a bad year for outages but they are not alone. On the same day that eBay went down last week we also saw outages at Facebook and Tumblr all due to internal IT issues rather than any sort of malicious attack. And judging from the response on Twitter none of the brands came out unscathed!What was eBay's response? Unfortunately this was the most frustrating part as the eBay response was...limited. Rather than taking a proactive approach across their site and on social media they said very little. Chris Dawson at Tamebay.com summed it up well stating that “...the communication plan that eBay employed is neither acceptable [nor] successful. They need to talk and reassure people from the earliest moment: on Twitter, on Facebook, in public. That they didn't is pretty reprehensible."Will the eBay sellers affected be compensated? The eBay response to Tamebay.com wasThere is no denying the frustration that these outages have on both eBay buyers and sellers but despite this the eBay marketplace is simply too powerful to ignore. We just hope that the tech team start peddling faster to keep these problems to a minimum so that you only have to worry about growing your business rather than wondering whether you storefront will be open for business that day!