ebay displaying text only

[grooveman76]

For the past several days, ebay has been intermittently been displaying text only.  It had been fixing itself after a few minutes or a few refreshes, but so far today it's stuck on text only.  I've tried Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and it's the same for 

[berserkerplanet]

Generally something like that is a CSS problem where the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that style the page are damaged in the cache, not downloading from the servers, or something similar. First order of business is to clear the browser cache to purge any damages files from your browser cache, and try again.

Happens sometimes on Thursday nights when eBay is doing maintenance (and maybe certain servers that dish up some of the scripts and CSS files are offlline or updating), but today isn't Thursday night 🙂

[grooveman76]

I tried that for both Chrome and Edge, but it makes no difference.  Sometimes the pages load correctly, but most of the time they don't.

[berserkerplanet]

Hmmm. Don't know what to tell you. You are the only one that has reported that problem which tends to indicate it's you, and not a widespread eBay issue.

Could be your ISP. Many ISPs use caching servers with larger websites these days (to lessen latencies and traffic to those sites), and the problem could be there - somehow parts of your page load requests are getting dropped or stale files in the ISP's cache are loading sometimes.

With load balancing and caching setups like that your outbound page requests wouldn't necessarily always be serviced by the same server, and depending on the pages requested, not all pages or static components of pages would be served from the cache and would be fulfilled by eBay directly.

For example, lets say you load your feedback profile page. There are about 3 dozen components to that page (mostly gif and png image files for the various icons, half a dozen external scripts, a CSS file, and a few other things). That is not including any advertising garbage (which I block and didn't see when I profiled that page load).

Most of the files are static, and many are somewhat universal across the eBay site (like the eBay logo, the script for the search box, etc.), and would be used by all the ISPs customers who visit eBay. Those files don't change often,  don't have to be re-retrieved from the eBay server often as they would normally would be cached in your browser's cache to be pulled up when a page request includes them. If they do need to be retrieved from the server (you cleared your browser cache or for other reasons), they might be retrieved from the ISP's cache if they are there. If something is wonky in there somewhere, the requests for some of the scripts of the CSS files (that style the pages ) might be awry.

That is just wild speculation about one possible mechanism.

Still not certain that what you refer to as "displaying text only" is what I am picturing when the CSS goes missing.

Here is a snapshot of the top of the homepage when I suppress all styling (same effect as having the CSS file go missing):

If not that, are you are seeing the raw HTML like this?

Is eBay the only site that is doing that? Did it just start recently?

[grooveman76]

It looked a lot like that.  It also would have strings of numbers and codes on it.  Ebay was the only site having that problem.  I called ebay, and they forwarded it to the tech specialists.  Later that night, everything started working again.