eBay Crashes Again

eBay's Web site woes continued over the weekend.

The online auction pioneer suffered a 10-hour blackout at 5 a.m. Pacific time on Friday that disabled the popular site completely and made its auctions unavailable. Auctions became accessible at about 3 p.m., but key features such as My eBay and the site's viewing gallery were unavailable throughout the weekend.

The company said it will refund the auction fees paid by all sellers who held auctions that ended during the blackout. It has not said how much the refunds will cost, but officials reported a loss of about $5 million during a 22-hour outage in June.

According to engineering reports issued on the site, the initial outage was caused by a hardware failure. "The system was rebooted, and both the primary and backup databases were up and functional," a report said. "However, at the time of this rebooting, the site encountered network anomalies that have prevented access to the site."

The reports did not provide specific information as to the hardware involved or the source of the network anomalies.

The outage is one of several site failures that eBay has suffered since May. In June, the company completed installation of a backup system and officials promised to re-evaluate the company's priorities and spend more time focusing on site availability and reliability.

eBay's stock dropped 9 5/8 points to 83 1/4 on Friday, a loss of more than 10 percent.