Steve I respect your post's point of view.
In my case today, the snipe I had placed (well in advance) was expected to be executed with 20 seconds lead time.
I was surprised when I saw the winning bid was lower than mine, and it was placed before my expected snipe would have been placed. My snipe would have won.
The time of day was roughly 12 noon PST today. not last night, so that doesn't match with the timing of ebay's stated difficulties.
In this case I had backed off my standard lead time to allow for slow processing or bandwidth issues on purpose! My assumption is that a 20 sec lead time is plenty for software response these days, and for ebay processing.
If response was typically slow one would expect to lose a lot of auctions with 5 sec snipe time chosen.That has NOT been the case for me in perhaps 25 bid snipes, excepting today.
That leads me to believe the problem was with Auction Sniper and their bid placement.
Maybe Auction Sniper had a problem.
Is this the place to be told by the company or to find out from others there has been a problem? I may be wrong, but with this forum it seems we'd learn of things when there is ANY issue.
That's why I even took the time to bring my issue to attention. Is this forum the right place?
I'm hoping to hear a plausible explanation.
So far, I don't think one's been posted.
I do expect Auction Sniper to be reliable. I will accept that it's not 100%, 100% of the time.
I'd just like to be told if it's known why my bid failed.
C