EBay Crashes

Sales of Beanie Babies and Pez dispensers on EBay Inc.’s Web site ground to a halt Wednesday as the auction service went down for hours. The auction portion of the service went down at 11:34 a.m. PST and was unavailable for more than three hours. It was up for a half hour, then stopped working again. A company spokesman said the parallel systems that operate EBay’s auction service both went down. The cause of the problem was unknown, but EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove denied the service had been hacked or interfered with by an outside intruder. EBay suffered big crashes in June and August 1999, which led the company to develop the parallel system as a form of backup to keep the company running through minor glitches. EBay’s home page was still online Wednesday and available, but the buying and selling features on the Web site remained unavailable through the outage. EBay shares rose $9.17 to close at $29.36 on Nasdaq.