Glitch Hits Online Site Of EBay; Auctions Resume After Nearly a Day
EBay, the boisterous online auction "community" and one of the signature successes among Internet commerce firms, was felled by a technical problem late Thursday that lasted about 22 hours.</br></br>Investors, however, were not pleased by the disruption. Shares of eBay Inc., one of Wall Street's highest Internet high-flyers over the last year, fell $16.81 1/4 yesterday to close at $165.87 1/2.</br></br>The San Jose company had notified customers throughout the day about efforts to fix the problem. "We're sorry, but the eBay system is temporarily unavailable," it had said on a portion of the site that still worked. At about 8:30 p.m., it said: "We believe we isolated the problem, and we will keep a vigilant watch." Shortly after that, service was restored.</br></br>But that was small consolation to eBay's more than 2 million participants -- purveyors of Beanie Babies, pink can openers, antique candy boxes and an array of items culled from the nations' attics. EBay typically has more than 2.2 million items up for bid at any given time.</br></br>When the site first crashed at about 11 p.m. Thursday, Sharon Doney of Severn was auctioning 10 vintage jazz and classical music LPs on eBay. Doney sells $600 to $900 a month at online auctions, making such sales a primary source of her household income. But in recent weeks Doney has grown frustrated with frequent crashes at eBay. The site went down for six hours Wednesday, seven hours May 20 and four hours May 3. Because of eBay's problems, Doney said she has "diversified" her online selling by using other online auction venues such as Yahoo and Amazon.com. "If I were only selling on eBay, I would be panicking at this point," Doney said.