April 2 — The Microsoft April Fool’s Day software bug tripped up eBay.com Sunday, causing the auction site’s computers to not properly adjust to Daylight Saving Time. Every auction that ended Sunday was effectively halted one hour early, costing auctioneers plenty of last-minute bids. A spokesperson for eBay confirmed the glitch, but said the company had fixed with problem by Monday morning.

THE PROBLEM STEMS from a bug found in 1999 by well-known Internet sleuth Richard Smith. Basically, the clock included in Microsoft’s Visual C++ programming environment has a flaw — when the first day of Daylight Saving Time falls on April 1, it fails to adjust the time until April 8. That confluence of events hit for the first time on Sunday, which was also April Fool’s Day.

       Because the bug was found so long ago, and most computers have been upgraded or patched, experts predicted the Microsoft April Fool’s bug to pass by without incident.      

       But the software that executes searches of eBay items utilized the C++ programming library and hadn’t been patched. That meant auctions were removed from eBay’s search one hour prematurely all day Sunday. A buyer could still manually find items and bid on them.

 “How does a billion dollar dot-com like eBay miss this?” asked irritated eBay customer Scott Dion. Advertisement

       “Typically on eBay, sellers see about 20 to 25 percent of bids in the last hour of an auction. On Sunday, only a few of my hotter items that already had many bids saw action in the last hour, but most others got none.”

       eBay spokesperson Kevin Pursglove said he couldn’t explain why eBay hadn’t patched the software. He said the company will refund eBay’s auction fee for any customer whose bidding ended on Sunday.        

MSNBC

-- Anonymous, April 03, 2001