A placed bid is on the server, not on your phone. Losing connection does not withdraw it, and if you are still highest when the clock stops, you have won.
That is the important thing and it is worth knowing before it happens.
What survives a drop
Every bid you placed. Gone from your screen is not gone from the auction.
Your position. If you were winning, you are still winning.
The clock, which runs on the server. A bid in the final ten seconds pushes it back out for everybody, whether or not you can see it. The last ten seconds
What does not survive
A bid you were about to place. Tapped and not acknowledged is not placed — if the request never reached the server, nothing happened. My bid did not go through
Your view of the price, which goes stale immediately. When you come back, tap the amount the app offers rather than one you remember.
The one real risk
Winning and not knowing. The payment window is 30 minutes, and an unpaid win counts as a strike.
There is a grace for exactly this — for a timed auction the window runs from when you first open the win, and at most 12 hours after it ends. So an auction that ended while you were offline does not expire the moment it closes. But twelve hours is the limit. What is an unpaid win?
Turn notifications on before you go anywhere. That is the whole mitigation. Notifications, explained
When you come back
Check your orders first, not the show. A win is in your orders whether or not the show is still running.
Then rejoin if the show is live — your bids are where you left them.
If you expect a bad connection
Set a maximum. Enter the most you will pay and the app bids for you in steps, with nothing depending on your being connected. It only goes up, and it is not available on sudden-death items. How to not get carried away
Bid early rather than late. Bidding is tiny — a few bytes — so you can bid on a connection too poor to watch the video. Watching a show without burning your data
For sellers, the mirror image
The same thing is true from your side: a dropped broadcast does not pause the auction, and items can close while you are offline. Do not end the show to start fresh. What happens if my connection drops mid-show?
More: if I leave the show, do I lose my bid, my bid did not go through, bidding on a phone.