EBay’s Auction Site Crashes Again

EBay Inc.’s auction site crashed again Friday morning and was still down eight hours later, with the company unable to say when it would be back up. EBay said its site went down at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time because of a hardware problem. When it tried to bring the site back up, it said it encountered “network anomalies” that prevented users from accessing the site. It was not clear how the hardware and network problems were related, and why a backup system the company had recently installed apparently did not work. EBay said it will extend all auctions that were interrupted by the outage and refund all fees for these auctions.

The latest problems follow a series of outages in June, including one in which the site was down for a full day and cost the company millions in lost revenue and expenses to beef up its infrastructure.

By early Friday afternoon, EBay had managed to correct the problem that had kept users off the site, although its auctions were still not working. A message the company posted on its online announcement board quoted EBay President Meg Whitman saying, “We will not rest until we fix this problem.”

EBay’s stock was the biggest decliner on Nasdaq, falling $9.63 to close at $83.25. Even before Friday’s outage, EBay’s stock had come under pressure with the rest of the Internet sector.