sscrabble,
We do have a feature called 'Automatically Save Listing Description' that you can turn on in your account preferences. It's the last item under listing management. Here is the help FAQ that explains how to use it. From your note, sounds like if you aren't using it, it might help you.
As far as us offering our service on an 'as is' basis, what support says about our terms of service is correct: We don't 'guarantee' a particular level of availability of our system or that it will be error free at all times.
But that said, we want people to have the best experience possible using our site. We have both advanced network and software monitoring tools also technical staff who are trained to use them to monitor our system and to react to problems when they happen. We work hard to keep our system running and working quickly and correctly.
However, between any user's PC and our servers lies the reality of the information highway: your connection to your ISP, and then miles and miles of thru-the-air microwave transmissions, satellite uplink/downlinks, and under ground fiber optic, and wires, and lots of relays, switches, routers and other network hardware all interacting with the electronic signals between your PC and our servers. We don't own the information highway, and we can't control whether all its many parts are working properly or not or whether they are overloaded with traffic or not. But, the information highway--while out of sight, out of mind--can have a big influence on the experience someone has who is using our site.