eBay suffers new outage

Online auctioneer eBay suffered a 90-minute outage this week but is unlikely to compensate users.

Shortly after 1pm Pacific Time on Thursday the site was letting around just eight per cent of visitors in, but after 2pm access was impossible.

A little over 90 minutes after the original slowdown occurred, the system was back online with the message: "We have identified and corrected the issue and pages are once more accessible."

There was an apology but no explanation of what caused the problem.

Any auctioneers hoping to see compensation could be disappointed as eBay only issues credit for loss incurred through downtime relating to its search engine or bidding systems.

Last January the site was down for 11 hours when the company delayed replacing certain hardware, and again in June for four hours.

In general, though, online auctioneers have been improving the reliability of service through things like more effective traffic management.