There is never a time we can do a release and make everyone happy. With customers in the UK, AU and US, we have users actively using our site 24/7.
That being said, there are definitely days and times that have less usage than others. We specifically do our weekly maintenance at one of the lowest traffic usage points of the week.
Right now, eBay activity is on a major upswing, as it is every year in the months preceding Christmas. We wanted to get this release out as early as we could this month to try and not interfere with the holiday posting rush, which is only going to increase over the next few weeks.
Many people will feel we should have waited 1 more week to wait for the listing discount period to be over. Looking at our statistical data, we felt that listing activity would remain about the same in the coming weeks, despite the discount being over. We then made the decision that the earlier date would be better to ensure that if we have to do any follow up releases to fix bugs they could be done as quickly as possible in this high volume listing season.
The decision on time of day was probably too optimistic on my part. Unfortunately, I needed to have all of my developers and support staff in the office today to make sure they could investigate issues as they arose. Given the size of our staff, I was not able to get enough people into the office in the middle of the night and had to set the release time to start at 6am Pacific time. Ideally, I would have liked to have started at 3 or 4am.
The site was targeted to be back up and running at 8:30am Pacific time and this actually was accomplished. What added an additional few hours of delays and site slowness was the mistake we made with a database update not being included during the scheduled downtime. We made an on the fly decision to run the update to fix errors on the website for certain users. In retrospect, it would have been better to not run that update until maintenance time (middle of night). Of course the users who were affected would probably think otherwise.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some perspective from our side of things. We do spend a lot of time planning out the best strategy for a release and sometimes have to live with the fact it will impact some users.
I apologize for any problems this has caused you today.
-Kevin