There is a read about what happened (from my point of view) here:
http://www.shawnhogan.com/2010/08/w...rism-and-meg-whitman-have-in-common-ebay.html
My guess is that just some higher ups at eBay saw what was going on in their affiliate program and probably just decided to clean house... I heard something like 80% of the top 100 affiliates were let go at the same time. And eBay's affiliate program managers all seemed to work for different companies or were placed in different divisions shortly thereafter.
I was just in the "lucky" position of being the #1 affiliate, so when you want to make an example, that's who you go after.