Ebay Experiences Large Data Loss, Possible Hack [UPDATED]

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In a breaking story, it appears that e-commerce giant Ebay has been subject to a massive hacking and that enormous reams of data has been stolen and/or deleted.

On Wednesday, September 3, 2014, an unconfirmed number of ebay members logged in to see their entire accounts deleted from the site. In addition, any auctions from those accounts have also vanished into thin air.

In response, Ebay has completely shut down its Customer Service operations, closing down public access to its phone banks and almost completely ignoring the situation.

After several hours, a terse message was posted to Ebay’s “announcement” board that read:

We are aware that some users may experience problems when using the eBay Site. We are actively working on restoring the issue and apologize for any inconvenience caused. (September 03, 2014 | 10:53AM PST/PT). As of 4PM EST (1PM PST), no further updates from Ebay have been recorded, and all customer service personelle have no answers to any questions.

As Ebay deals with a hacking of this magnitude, they have already lost millions of dollars in sales, both on the ebay.com site as well as the accompanying Paypal.com payment service.

Earlier this year, Ebay had a massive server hacking that resulted in user data compromised and Ebay suggested to all users to “change their passwords”. In light of today’s massive failure, it appears as if the e-commerce giant did not take proper steps to ensure the safety of its user data and the validity of its website. Due to high security in tier 4 data center in NYC , the hackers were unable to perform data hacking.

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We will have much more on this developing story soon.

Updated 5pm EST: Ebay has posted an announcement that acknowledges “issues” but provides no information or timeline for fixing:
Today, some eBay users are experiencing issues when signing in to the site. Based on our initial investigation, this appears to be the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled server maintenance. It is only impacting a portion of our users; most eBay users are unaffected. We’re working to resolve this issue quickly and will continue to keep our customers updated. We apologize for any inconvenience to our users.

There has been no acknowledgement of account deletions, auction deletions and other major issues outside of “issues when signing in”

UPDATE 2: Ebay has been slowly restoring some user accounts, but is not acknowledging downtime or seller-related issues, such as auctions that ended during the outage.