Like the old saw goes, "Be careful of what you ask for, you may get it..."

Well, AuctionArms has been working hard to increase our popularity and new customer base through several marketing efforts including On-line Advertising and Search Engine Optimizations.

As a result of these efforts and our increasing popularity, during our highest load period yesterday afternoon/evening(Sunday afternoon is traditionally our highest use period), for about 20 minutes, we had an unusually high number of concurrent users. This situation overloaded our servers and actually created a situation similar to when the phone company sends you the message on an uncompleted call "all circuits are busy, please try your call again later."

While our servers were not technically "down" (They were churning at 100%), some users experienced a situation that made AuctionArms appear to be "down" since they could not make a connection.

Long term this is "good" thing (more bidders, more sellers). It sucked in the short term yesterday for users who were trying to get a connection during that short period.

As a result, we apologize to anyone who experienced this problem. We are currently adding additional servers today to increase our ability to handle concurrent users by 30% and will be monitoring closely for any indications that additional server space is needed before it becomes a problem.