On Sunday evening the website stopped working properly. Bidding failed, account pages came up blank, and past auction results would not load. We took the site down and put a holding page up while we fixed it.
Here is what happened, in plain English, and what it means for you.
What went wrong
One of the background services the site runs on stopped responding, and a good part of the site went down with it.
Those services sit behind almost everything here — showing you a lot, placing a bid, loading your delivery address. When one of them stopped, every page that depended on it began returning an error instead of content.
That is why the symptoms looked so scattered. Your saved address had not been deleted; the page simply could not retrieve it, and showed you an empty box rather than telling you something had gone wrong. The same underlying fault produced the failed bids and the blank results pages.
It was not a hack, and it was not anything you did.
Your account and your bids
Nothing was lost.
- Every bid placed before the outage still stands.
- No account details, addresses or payment information were deleted, changed or exposed.
- No lot closed while the site was unavailable, so no lot was won or lost while you could not get to it.
- If your address looked blank on Sunday, it is still there. It was never gone — it just was not loading.
Why we extended the auction
The site was unreachable from Sunday evening into Monday morning — the closing stretch of the auction, when people go back through the lots they have been watching and decide on their final bids.
Closing on time would have meant ending the auction after a night when a good many bidders could not get in to do exactly that. So we have given it another full day.
The new closing time is Tuesday 22 September, 8pm (UK time). Bidding is working normally again, so if you had lots you were watching on Sunday, you have a day to come back to them.
What we are doing about it
Two things, and the second matters more than the first.
The first is the immediate cause. We have traced it, we know what it was, and we are dealing with it — along with monitoring, so that this kind of problem reaches us early rather than at the same moment it reaches you.
The second is the real lesson. A fault in one background service should have made the site slower, not taken it off the air. Too much of the site depended on that one piece being available. We are changing that, so that the next time something goes wrong behind the scenes, the site in front of you keeps working while we deal with it.
If something still looks wrong
If anything is still not behaving — a bid you are not certain went through, a page that will not load, details that look wrong — email us at [email protected] and we will check it for you personally.
If you tried to bid on Sunday and were not sure whether it registered, please do get in touch. We would far rather check than have you assume.
We are sorry. An auction house that cannot be reached on a closing evening is not much use to anyone, and we know Sunday was a frustrating night for a lot of you. Thank you for your patience while we put it right.