Phone number validation rejects new Canadian area codes 257 and 942

If you have a Canadian phone number with area code 257 (British Columbia) or 942 (Toronto/Ontario), eBay will reject it as invalid when you try to use it for account verification, checkout, or any phone number field on the site.

These numbers are not valid against the Regex for CA. When you search for the `country_calling_codes` in the javascript files you will see what I mean.

These are real, active area codes approved by the CRTC (Canada's telecom regulator) under Decision 2023-135. Area code 942 went live April 26, 2025 and 257 went live May 24, 2025. They are assigned to major carriers like Telus, Bell, and Rogers. These are not VoIP numbers, not temporary numbers, and not anything unusual. They are standard Canadian mobile and landline numbers.

The problem is that eBay's phone number validation library (likely Google's libphonenumber or a similar package) contains a hardcoded list/regex of valid Canadian (CA) area codes in its metadata, and that metadata has not been updated to include 257 or 942. The validation rejects the number before it ever reaches carrier verification or SMS delivery. Clearing your cache, switching browsers, or any other standard troubleshooting will not fix this because the rejection happens server-side against an outdated allowlist.

I have confirmed that current versions of all major phone validation libraries (libphonenumber v9.0.7+, intl-tel-input v25.11.0+) recognize both area codes as valid. eBay's system is the outlier.

This is not an isolated issue. I have encountered the same outdated-metadata problem on multiple platforms over the past several months and have successfully gotten it fixed elsewhere by reporting it. The root cause is always the same: the platform's phone validation dependency needs to be updated to a version released after mid-2025.

For context, another new Canadian area code (273, Eastern Quebec) goes live February 27, 2027, so this will recur unless eBay establishes a process for keeping this metadata/regex current.

Here is the current Regex for CA area codes:

<span>"CA":["1","011","[2-9]\\\\d{9}|3\\\\d{6}",[7,10],0,"1",0,0,0,0,0,[["(?:2(?:04|[23]6|[48]9|50|63)|3(?:06|43|54|6[578]|82)|4(?:03|1[68]|[26]8|3[178]|50|74)|5(?:06|1[49]|48|79|8[147])|6(?:04|[18]3|39|47|72)|7(?:0[59]|42|53|78|8[02])|8(?:[06]7|19|25|7[39])|9(?:0[25]|42))[2-9]\\\\d{6}",[10]],["",[10]],["8(?:00|33|44|55|66|77|88)[2-9]\\\\d{6}",[10]],["900[2-9]\\\\d{6}",[10]],["52(?:3(?:[2-46-9][02-9]\\\\d|5(?:[02-46-9]\\\\d|5[0-46-9]))|4(?:[2-478][02-9]\\\\d|5(?:[034]\\\\d|2[024-9]|5[0-46-9])|6(?:0[1-9]|[2-9]\\\\d)|9(?:[05-9]\\\\d|2[0-5]|49)))\\\\d{4}|52[34][2-9]1[02-9]\\\\d{4}|(?:5(?:2[125-9]|33|44|66|77|88)|6(?:22|33))[2-9]\\\\d{6}",[10]],0,["310\\\\d{4}",[7]],0,["600[2-9]\\\\d{6}",[10]]]]</span>

This regex is missing the items for 257 and 942. I'm not familiar Ebay's internal website development but likely this is a simple library update.

Unfortunately ebay support people, who I've contacted twice over the phone, are not able to help fix this issue or escalate to the appropriate people.

Would appreciate if anyone can forward this to the appropriate internal ebay dev/engineering team to get fixed. Also it's likely preventing a pretty sizable number of people from being able to register accounts with ebay as all phone number with those area codes cannot be validated.