After the switch from daylight saving time back to standard time in Europe eBay's auction system apparently ends all auctions one hour early, while the remaining time for each auction still shows 60 minutes.

This means that many auctions got a low price, because many bidders customarily bid late because of the peculiar auction method eBay uses. (eBay auctions end at a predefined point in time, rather than being extended until there is no new bid for a certain time, as is usual in normal auctions.)

This leads to the strange situation that sellers can now unilaterally declare any of the affected auctions invalid, demand the eBay fees back, and start the auction afresh. Most sellers should actually do this to have a chance to achieve a decent price.

I (your friendly admin) was personally hit by the defect, because I had an auction running that ended a few hours ago. It was only a small sale, so I'm not unduly suffering, but I found it interesting to see how a big renowned company like eBay can fall foul of such a simple error. Time values are fairly well standardized (see ISO 8601), servers switch to and from daylight saving time automatically and anyway get their time from central time servers, and an almost childishly simple algorithm for an international company is to run everything on the never changing UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) and transform everything from there to the local time.

The event only proves once again that big companies can be incredibly incompetent.

The most incredible bit of information here is that this has happened at eBay before, when switching to DST earlier this year. Would you believe this?