Users of the popular online auction service eBay were unable to bid for Furbys, beanie babies or anything else for over two hours Friday morning, as the company suffered its third system outage in two weeks.
The company said the outage resulted from a hardware failure.From about 3 and a half hours eBay's 1 million users could view the items they wanted, but were unable to bid on them, according to the company.
The outages come at the busiest time of the year for the e-commerce firm.
As per its policy, eBay is automatically extending the deadlines by 24 hours for all auctions that were scheduled to end -- something like allowing a classified ad to run an extra day.
"It's important to compensate our community, and we feel these are appropriate steps," said an eBay representative.
The company's service was downed twice last week by glitches in third-party software. Monday, Dec. 7, a failed upgrade of the Veritas software used to run eBay's storage system resulted in a 14-hour blackout.
Stock not hurt
The same problem cropped up again last Dec. 9. eBay also crashed Nov. 3 as a result of a problem with its T1 connection to the Internet.
The crash did not seem to have much of an impact on eBay's stock, which has risen steadily since its IPO earlier this year. Friday afternoon the stock was selling for about $US260, up $US20.
"We recognize hard outages such as this one can be frustrating to members of our community. We understand the lost time is crucial to our buyers and sellers so we routinely extend auctions to compensate our community members," said Michael Wilson, vice president, site operations and product development, in a statement.
