Site problems hit eBay

NEWS eBay experienced site problems for several hours on Monday, delaying or preventing people from accessing parts of the popular auction site. The company said it has now resolved all the problems. "We have identified and corrected the issue that caused this situation, and full access has been restored to all members," the company said on its announcements board. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this issue has caused and thank you for your patience while we resolved this situation." eBay representatives did not return calls seeking comment. The company has put an emphasis on site stability after being plagued with site problems in the past. eBay's site suffered a nearly five-hour slowdown earlier this year. That followed a series of outages and problems in March and April. The company is in the middle of rolling out its next-generation V3 system architecture, which will include real-time updates for eBay's data warehouse and minute-by-minute updates for listings. Some 70 per cent of the page views delivered by eBay's servers are now on V3, the company said recently at its annual analyst day meeting. eBay also recently reported that it experienced 99.9 percent uptime in the third quarter. Such statistics do not typically include the company's weekly planned outages to update the site. The site problems on Monday initially prevented people from accessing completed auctions or using parts of their personalised "My eBay pages," which track auctions that members have recently bid on or listed, eBay said on its announcements board. The site problems caused pages on the site to load slowly for some users, eBay added. Initially the company reported that the site slowdown affected Netscape Navigator users and those who accessed the site via America Online. However, the company did not say what caused the problem, and it reported later that other members may have been affected. Troy Wolverton writes for News.com