posted on April 4, 2001 03:37:16 PM
The story on the sign in page about eBay closing auctions early on Sunday really confused me.
This is Spring. The clock hand moves forward. When Eastern Standard time says 10 AM ,Daylight Savings time says 11 AM. Right?
Ok. So if I have an auction listed last week on Eastern Standard Time to end this Sunday April 1 at 10 AM and there was a bug that prevented eBay from updating their clock then the auction would end at 11AM daylight savings time or 10 AM Eastern Standard time.
How could this bug cause eBay to end the auction early? That could only happen in the FAll (fall back) Explain please, because someone in one of the newspapers or even here should have caught this as a bold faced lie.
posted on April 5, 2001 04:38:58 AM
The bug, one the software vendor knew about in 1999 AND provided a fix for in early 2000, is very simple ... it DOES NOT UPDATE the system time if the first day of daylight savings time is also April 1. It catches up the next weekend, after a week of inaccurate time.
And some of eBay's servers were running an unfixed version of that program. So they ended auctions on PST (an hour "early" instead of DST.
instead of DST.