All of our 1000+ suddenly relisted on October 18th, 2017, regardless of how old they were.

[3145nebraska]

I am going to try something new. I have been in contact with eBay Customer Service multiple times since the week of October 18th, and basically the last call I was told that there is no problem, and they don't intend to look into it (if in fact they did to begin with).  Below is a copy of my first posting of this issue somewhere in eBay Community, before I stumbled across the TECHNICAL section. 

 "Literally, as of October 18, 2017, all of the listings in our store were somehow relisted. Obviously this is an eBay end issue, with our first (but not our only) issue being that the system we used for reviewing items that were in the final 24 hour period before self renewing (all but a few are good til cancelled) is irrelevant now that we discovered yesterday that every single listing in our active directory has a START DATE of 10/18/2017. 
That is not only NOT TRUE (we have thousands of listings created over two years that all had varying life cycles, on the good til cancelled cycle,) but a pretty enormous problem and additionally, we WERE fee'd an insertion fee for what looks like every one of these.
There appear to be some other issues as well. A few listings have mysteriously appeared in drafts as well as being live, even though none of our staff has recently edited or recently created them. Also, at least of one of our listings which should have shown "sold out" yesterday remained live until I marked it as paid and shipped. 
I was really hoping that by this morning it would have been miraculously resolved and turned out to be an eBay back-end issue but this is apparently not going to be our luck on this.
Has anyone else experienced these issues? Not even sure where to begin to try addressing this - other than to call eBay, which we will - but wanted to  know if this is just us. It's as if we were hacked, honestly. "
--- Since this post, we have had ZERO help or investigation from eBay. 
Let me try to recap what happened, for anyone just tuning in.  Around the 19th we noticed that suddenly all of our listings up til the 18th had RELISTED somehow (not by us.  This is important: We did NOT relist 1000+ listings, nor did we create all of our listings ON the 18th). All 1000+ are virtually minutes apart in their time stamps. We have been running this business for two years now, and while we do have virtually all set up as good til cancelled, they had varying start dates. There is NO CONCEIVABLE REASON OUR ENTIRE DATABASE OF LISTINGS SHOULD HAVE SIMILTANEOUSLY STOPPED, THEN RESTARTED ON THE 18th. 
EBay Customer Service appears to consist entirely of folks with very limited ability to actually answer or refer to someone who can answer, a very serious and technical question. I have gone around and around around and around and around with many people who first explain what good til cancelled means as if I don't know, and then promise to look into it and call back, which  never happens, and finally to call back and repeat that, yes, your listings were listed on the 18th. We are closing the service request. 
You cannot just batch end 1000 listings at one time even if you wanted to. Nor, can you batch list 1000 at a time, even if you wanted to. (From eBay's interface - NO THIRD PARTY APPS, nothing that ran as a utility to stop and then start every listing we had).
They basically gave me the impression that for all the business we've done with them, they don't care, and so what if several hundred listings had insertion fees even though not a single one of our staff stopped or started 1000 listings on the 18th. 
It's insane and frustating and I'm putting it here in the hopes that someone will give a sh&*t, and perhaps a technically qualified eBay service reprentative of some sort can give us some advice as to - even if WE DIDN'T CAUSE this, how in the world can we avoid it happening again!?!?!?!?!?
I guarantee if  100,000 users had this happen at once they'd care, and if it cost them MONEY, they would care .

[3145nebraska]

How is it that the only eBay response this got was a notice that the other comment I made on another thread referring to this issue was removed for hijacking another thread / not observing eBay rules for posting? I got a nice email explaining that we violated duplicate posting rules but the actual issue we have is going unacknowledged and unaddressed. 
This is a huge problem and a very serious issue for us. Beyond the fact that we were fee'd insertion fees on a bunch of listings that relisted via a BUG, there is no guarantee that this won't happen again as there has been ZERO attention given to what caused it in the first place.  
I don't know how people get results for technical issues like these when it's more important to respond to a duplicate post than it is to assign the appropriate customer service team to an issue with appropriate communication as to the actions being taken to resolve a website glitch that should be eBay's responsibility.
No wonder people are tearing their hair out all over this board.

[3145nebraska]

Is there no recourse or no way to get service on a technical issue / bug in eBay ? 
Our business has a good reputation, we've invested a lot of time and money into our eBay site and our buyers, whom we appreciate so much and we've given eBay solid business. We've been able to build relationships with our eBay buyers and make great progress since we began this site two and a half years ago. For the most part we have had very few issues with the platform itself until this, and since our problem began it has been a real education in the customer service side of eBay -its focus on buyer protections and similar complaints from other sellers when it comes to being absolutely unable to get an answer on the seller side when one is most needed. Thankfully, other than being erroneously fee'd for hundreds and hundreds of listings we did not physically relist ourselves, and being inconvenienced by that fact that everything up to and including the 18th of October is now moving forward as one good-til-cancelled mammouth batch, we are fortunate that we haven't lost business (that we are aware of - we did lose data on listings which had watchers, and lost "sold" data attached to many of those relistings), but  it appears that at least the listings themselves are in tact.  It is, however, beyond concerning that our complaint is going to remain unacknowledged, uninvestigated, and unfixed. I worry about future "bugs" - what is to prevent this from happening again, or worse?

For any of you who can't picture what happened, imagine this: On October 17th you had a storefront with more than 1000 listings, most good-til-cancelled and staggered in terms of their start dates with always just a handful that are counting down in the 24-hour "time left" category.
On the 19th you suddenly realize that every single one of your listings now has a new "start date" of the October 18th. All 1000+ listings were virtually created seconds apart from one another on the 18th and are now proceeding through a new good-til-cancelled cycle in unison though neither you nor any one of the other 2 people who work directly on your eBay site know why, or did anything to cause this. 
Your first couple calls to eBay are each directed to a different customer service rep, none of whom can quite picture the scenario you describe, probably because they've never heard of such a thing, and from the front/user end the site itself looks normal. There is a bit of a language barrier that isn't helping things along, but patiently you attempt to sum up this issue in the clearest and most concise way you can. Several CS reps and several-fully-repeated-descriptions-of-the-situation in, you have been given the definition of "good til cancelled" multiple times and are told that there is no issue, that these listings were all created on the 18th of October.
Except that they WEREN'T. 
Around the 5th or 6th service call you are told that you can refer to SR number for the Service Request that this issue was filed under to avoid having to explain this over and over and over to the new person every time you try to follow up (You have given your number as requested multiple times with the promise that you will receive a call in follow up, but the first four times this doesn't happen, and days, and then weeks elapse).  The next time you call you refer to the SR, receive someone new who reads the SR while you wait, who then needs you to explain the problem in its entirety again and by this point you are ready to rip your own face off in frustration. You ask if you can please have a direct line to someone - anyone - in the service department most appropriate for handling applications / software / eBay development team level issues and are told that eBay does not allow direct connecting to anyone beyond the customer service call center. You are told that they will look into it further but beyond the SR # there is no way to speak more than once with the same individual if you are the one placing the call, and no way to speak directly to someone in charge. You are promised a return call. Finally, nearly another week later you DO receive a call back from the last rep you spoke with but you MISS the call and she leaves a message. 
Which is: "as you can see, all of your listings which are good til cancelled, have a start date of the 18th, which means that they were created on the 18th. We are closing your SR." None of the service reps we spoke with even understood - I'm fairly certain - what the problem even is.  To them it appears as if we created our entire storefront of listings in one day, minutes apart, no problem. It took us two years to put together this number of listings, we probably can't exceed 20 in a WEEK.  We cannot explain to ourselves what occurred and the people most responsible for telling us won't take our calls. 
I truly hope that leaving a public record somehow generates interest because the people we report to aren't thrilled with the answer that eBay doesn't know and that's the end of the story. 
Cheers.

[3145nebraska]

I wonder which of the "97 views" this page has received are our own, which are kind and wellmeaning but equally stymied fellow community eBay users and which are actual eBay employees? 
It would have been a forensic IT nightmare had it been investigated fully on the 19th, 20th, or anywhere in the first week following this event, I'm sure, but can you imagine what it would be like now - a full month later? 
My boss and other coworkers were imagining that, just as on OS has a built-in recovery function wherein you can pick a safe date to restore your pc to, that eBay most likely has an absolute wealth of servers, and probably mirror-image / site copies that are saved and generated along the way, probably collecting dust on a server overseas somewhere. Our grand hope in the week following our mystery relist of our entire store was that, barring an actual explanation or FIX to the bug, that they might be able to select a recent "version" of our site and restore it to that point, pre-1000+ listings mystery re-list, complete with connections to both our "watchers" and our previously "sold" links. Honestly, we never got this off the ground and into the ear of someone who indicated that they fully understood the issue. Very very very VERY disappointing.  
Now a month out, we have created approximately 25 completely new listings - <<<--- and THAT should indicate how often we create new listings, or the rate at which we are even physically able to do so - as well as having sold a fair number of items, made edits to listings already in existence. Even if we COULD restore our site to the day before the "event" happened, there would be unanticipated and probably unwelcome changes made to innocent bystander listings at this point. 
It's incredibly worrisome and disheartening to realize that the platform itself just isn't as stable as we once assumed, that massive, across-the-board catastrophies can and will sometimes happen. 
At what point did the ability to reach out for help just die on the vine, we wonder.....

[dtexley3]

You typically won't get responses from eBay staff unless you @ mention them in the post.  I don't believe that any of the community message are read by eBay unless they are requested to, and frequently not then.

I feel for your issue, and hope you were able to get the fees refunded.  Many sellers have seen the "phantom relisting" of one or two items, but never on the scale you experienced.  FYI, if CS promised an investigation it was just to get you off the phone.  They are paid by the number of calls they answer not the number of issues solved.