eBay Apologises For Tenth Major Outage Of 2014

Earlier this morning, online retail and auction giant eBay suffered its tenth major outage of 2014, with many European users complaining they were unable to access the site, check their auctions or place bids for a number of hours.

Some users were especially concerned about auctions ending today, since the majority of the bids traditionally arrive during the final hours of the bidding process and an outage could result in lost income.

eBay has apologised for the outage and said the problem has now been resolved.

eBay UK outage

“Some users experienced problems accessing eBay in Europe from 08.55am BST until 12.33pm,” a spokesperson told TechWeekEurope. “All eBay sites are now available to all users and throughout this issue users who could access the site were able to trade normally.

“eBay’s technical experts identified this was due to upstream Internet Service Provider (ISP) issues and bypassed the problem to restore access as quickly as possible.  We take these issues very seriously and apologise for the inconvenience.”

Downdetector.co.uk says this is by far the longest outage of the year so far, with the site unavailable for three and a half hours. The previous record was set on Saturday June 28 when eBay was unavailable for an hour.

“The persistent site problems that Ebay UK is suffering indicate that Ebay is unable to fix the computer problems that are causing these outages,” suggests Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector.co.uk.

This latest outage is just one of a number of problems suffered by eBay this year. In May the company was forced to ask all of its estimated 128 million users to change their passwords after admitting that hackers were able to steal employee log-in credentials and breach its customer database.

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