From around midday users may have experienced problems with certain pages on the site, receiving the ‘broken sofa’ error page. During routine maintenance work, the search index was corrupted which caused these error pages. The error was spotted a couple of hours later (via a twitter report) and was rectified. This caused issues such as sellers being unable to create shops or items and buyers not being able to checkout.
We’ve added further monitoring of the site (site search to be specific) which should allow the support team to to respond to these kinds of issues much quicker in the future.
We will be regenerating the search index at midnight tonight which will require the site to be unavailable for approximately two hours.
UPDATE: This index regeneration was completed successfully, the service was unavailable for approximately 1.5 hours.
