EBay Web Site Down for Hours

S A N   J O S E, Calif., Jan. 4 -- Sales of Beanie Babies and Pezdispensers on the eBay Web site ground to a halt Wednesday as theauction service went down for hours.

The auction portion of the service went down at 11:34 a.m. PSTand was unavailable for more than three hours. It was up for a halfhour, then stopped working again.

A company spokesman said the parallel systems that operateeBay’s auction service both went down. The cause of the problem wasunknown, but eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove denied the service hadbeen hacked or interfered with from an outside intruder.

EBay suffered big outages in June and August of 1999, which ledthe company to develop the parallel system as a form of backup tokeep the company running through minor glitches.

EBay’s home page was still online Wednesday and available, butthe buying and selling features on the Web site remainedunavailable through the outage. Items for sale where bidding wasscheduled to end Wednesday would be extended by 24 hours, thecompany said on its Web site.