eBay's Australian and New Zealand auctions were wiped out for the entire trading day yesterday, the backlash of a back-up system that failed to kick start causing a major server meltdown.

"This outage was the result of a series of failures that affected both our primary and back-up systems," a company statement said.

The outage began at about 4.30 am yesterday when a back-up system blundered and didn't jump-start the auction site's operations.

The system was restarted but a further problem in the storage system shared by the primary and back-up systems caused the site to crash again.

A third back-up system, which could have saved the day, was brought into play at about 9.45am and breathed life into the site for just 40 minutes before a final, fatal dive took the site down for the remainder of the day.

The site was fully restored and operational by about 5pm.

eBay admitted it had known "for a while" that a potential problem existed on its shared disk hardware, but delayed the recommended upgrade because a series of work-arounds had "previously proven effective".

Unable to put off the upgrade any longer, eBay said hardware upgrades will be implemented in the next few weeks but couldn't elaborate on the schedule or comment further on the anticipated downtime of six hours.

eBay said it was too early to determine how many auctions had been affected by the wipe out by said it would extend all impacted listings by 24 hours and credit user fees, including insertion fees and final value fees.

"We apologise to our community for this lengthy interruption of service," eBay said.

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