When the eBay site goes down, the company is not committed to extending listings or refunding seller fees anymore. These changes were made – without informing sellers of the policy change.

In 1999, when founder Pierre Omidyar and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman first put the policy into place, it stated: 

– In the event of a hard outage of two hours or more, eBay automatically extends listings for 24 hours.

– In the event of a title search outage of one or more hours, eBay automatically credits all associated fees for affected listings. The following listings will be eligible for credit: Any listing scheduled to end during the outage; Any listing scheduled to end in the hour after the end of the outage. Unlike our policy for hard outages of two hours or more, listings will not be extended.

For the new eBay Outage Policy, Read more here