My first attempt using this service

Lane, it does happen sometimes. It's just unfortunate that it happened to you on your first snipe. You might go for a hundred more snipes before it happens again. Friday nights and weekends are especially busy times for eBay and the probability of an eBay system failure is proportionately greater because of that, but I hasten to say that compared to the millions of bids that are successfully placed every day on eBay, their system failure rate is infinitesimal.

It's happened to all of us here on AS at one time or another. There's nothing AS can do about eBay's computers, unfortunately.

Maybe AS should send all newly registered AS users the info on http://www.auctionsniper.com/risks.aspx so that they are aware before they set up AS what the risks are.

Maybe it's because I'm in the UK and awake whilst others sleep but I have never had a problem with AS not bidding on my behalf.

Lane, keep at it - it really does work but, like any tool, it isnt 100%...

Lane, all snipes have confirmation links after the snipe has fired.

Here is yours for the snipe that didnt win:
http://www.auctionsniper.com/SnipeConfirmation.aspx?sid=3285464

Log in on the snipe and go to the My snipes tab and then enter the link above.

We did send the snipe and sent it on time. eBays response was: "Unknown Error"

There is nothing we can do when eBay bites the dust. They obviously had trouble processing bids at that point in time. We did send your bid, and sent it on time. This is almost always the case. The same thing probably would have happened if you were sniping manually becuase eBay was just having a hiccup at that time. The rarely if ever announce any system problems that last more than 5 minutes. And they certainly announce ZERO problems that happen on just a couple of their computers. I'm sure they have hundreds. So at any point a few could be having trouble and most eBay users wouldnt know. Most users would be lucky enough to connect through working ones. That could also have been the case here. It's really impossible for us to tell.