eBay users reported problems accessing the company's home page Monday. In a note to customers, the auction giant said that "some" of its pages were "intermittently unavailable".
"We have identified the source of the issue, and restored full access to all pages," the company said in a note on one of its announcements boards. "We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused you."
The company did not give details about the problem and eBay representatives did not return calls seeking comment.
For more than nine hours on Sunday, eBay customers could not view or bid on items in the company's jewellery or clothing areas. Additionally, sellers couldn't list items in those categories during the outage.
eBay suffered a nearly 11-hour outage in January 2001 when its primary and backup systems failed because of the company's decision to delay replacing some of its hardware. The site had been relatively stable since then.
But in recent months, the company has seen an upsurge in problems. Last month, eBay suffered a 90-minute outage that affected customers' ability to reach its home page and other "static" pages. Later in the month, a site slowdown affected eBay users' ability to reach the site for nearly three hours.
eBay is upgrading its back-end systems with its "V3" initiative, which will include real-time updates for its data warehouse and minute-by-minute updates for listings. Listings are now updated once per hour. The company has said the upgrade was not responsible for last month's outages.
