Here's a link to a Forbes article about it. You're right: my memory was distorted. The outage was only 22 hours. (I'm sure it felt like three days to the Ebay admins at the time.)

Fun fact: the "Steve Abatangle" quoted in the article is yours truly, and the author of the piece is Dan Lyons, now AKA Fake Steve Jobs.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0726/6402238a.html