Trade Me hit by major outage

UPDATE: Trade Me came back online shortly after 1pm. Problems on the site from 11am affected 38,903 auctions due to close. All are being extended by five hours.

The usually rock-solid Trade Me [NZX:TME] went offline just before midday, and as NBR writes has been down for nearly an hour.

"We’ve taken the site down as a precaution while the tech crew get their heads in there and sort it out," spokesman Paul Ford tells NBR.

"We started seeing issues at 11am and we made the call to take the site down at 11:58am."

Trade Me has industrial-stength precautions against its web hosting falling over. The site is mirrored on separate server farms in Auckland and Wellington for fully redundant fail-over. But the current situation appears to be more complicated.

"The issue is to do with the way our data is synchronised inside Trade Me," Mr Ford says.

"Obviously we‘re sorry for any inconvenience for our members and we will get it sorted as soon as possible. We will be extending listings that have been affected to minimise hassles for our members. We hope to be back up and running again soon.

"We’ll be keeping people updated on Twitter (twitter.com/trademe) and Facebook."

Trade Me's last major outage was back in 2010, Mr Ford says. That episode, which also struck Stuff, was pinned on Datacom.

There is no estimated time to fix today's blackout, bar "as soon as possible."

Trade Me has around 2.4 million active users; lunch time is a peak time for office workers to take a sneaky look at their auctions.

NBR staff
Wed, 09 Oct 2013

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Trade Me hit by major outage

What’s happening Trade Me?

What’s happening Trade Me?