eBay down: Auction site and app stop working

Even short disruption can cause vast financial problems for sellers and buyers who use auction and sales site

Andrew Griffin
Wednesday 12 June 2019 04:15 EDT
Comments
eBay down: Auction site and app stop working

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

eBay‘s website and app was hit by a major outage, leaving thousands unable to access the online auctions site.

Efforts to log on to the auction and sales site brought up a blank page, while the app was also failing to load after an unexplained outage

eBay is used for billions of transactions each day and so even the shortest disruption can cause vast financial problems for the sellers and buyers who visit it.

Most issues were reported in Europe, according to the website Downdetector. But that might be a result of the fact much of the rest of the world is asleep.

eBay maintains a system status page, intended to indicate when there are problems with its service. But that appeared to be affected by the issues too, and failed to load after the main site went down.

Soon after the major outage began, users reported that service was coming back to the website. But some parts continued to be broken for a short while – while the homepage loaded, for instance, users reported being unable to access their personal account or other sections of the site.

Now eBay says the service is fully back and auctions will be back online.

“eBay experienced technical difficulties for a short period today, where users may have temporarily had trouble accessing the site," a spokesperson said. "The issue is now fully resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience.”

eBay claims to be used by 180 million active buyers, who together spend nearly $100bn (£79m) each year.

As well as running the main auction site, the company also owns ticketing service StubHub and sells classified ads.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in