Sellers and buyers on eBay have been left fuming after an outage meant they could not use the website yesterday. The outage is the tenth one for the firm this year and affected not only users in the UK but also most of northern Europe.
The downtime lasted from early in the morning until mid-afternoon, which prompted the site to issue an apology but no explanation as to why the site was offline for so long.
However, a few users did manage to access the site via mobile broadband and through the app on various platforms.
"Some users experienced problems accessing eBay in Europe from 08.55am BST until approximately 12.40pm," the site said.
"Our technical experts immediately investigated potential causes including third party internet service provider access issues. All eBay sites are working normally and we are sorry for the inconvenience."
According to Downdetector.cok, a website that monitors others for downtime, the latest outage was the largest for eBay users this year. "Both in terms of duration of the problems and the number of users that are impacted," said Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector.co.uk.
The site has suffered around 10 outages this year. The one before this was on 28 June and lasted less than an hour. Earlier in the year, the firm was attacked by the Syrian Electronic Army in and hackers managed to illegally access 145 million accounts, leading the firm to issue a plea to users to change their passwords.
Sellers took to Twitter to vent their fury and demand compensation. One Twitter user, Paul Lowndes, said "I have items I'm selling that finish tonight, most of my bids come in on the last day, is there going to be any compensation?"
IT Pro approached eBay for further comment on whether any compensation will be made to customers. At the time of writing, we had not received a reply.
