You may suspect that it is false, but it seems to be ebay's story and they are sticking to it.
From the open letter from the founders now on Ebay's home page
To help ensure this, we are working diligently on a hot backup system that should automatically limit the length of potential outages to less than an hour or so. We have been working on this system for many months, and it is almost ready. Sadly, if we had this system in place a few days ago, we might have avoided this outage.
Slashdot Mirror
You may suspect that it is false, but it seems to be ebay's story and they are sticking to it.
From the open letter from the founders now on Ebay's home page
To help ensure this, we are working diligently on a hot backup system that should automatically limit the length of potential outages to less than an hour or so. We have been working on this system for many months, and it is almost ready. Sadly, if we had this system in place a few days ago, we might have avoided this outage.
This seems to me to be an operations problem.
1) No hot swap for the back end database
2) According to ABC news they are restoring from tape.
I mean, even if your back-end database bursts into flames, you should have a path to recovery that doesn't take 12+ hours, right?