Power outage downs eBay

eBay users looking to buy or sell on the online auction giant were met instead with varying degrees of inaccessibility, an issue the site blamed on a power outage Monday night. A little after 9 p.m. Pacific, individual auction pages were unavailable, and soon the site's main page was inaccessible.

eBay's system announcements page posted a message saying, "We are aware the site is unavailable. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible."

About an hour later, the auction giant updated the message to read, "eBay experienced a power outage at a principal hosting facility in the (San Francisco) Bay Area. Some eBay functions and listings are now available, and we are working to fully restore the rest of the site."

One News.com reader expressed frustration over the outage.

"With the recent increase in fees by eBay," the reader said in an e-mail, "we the customers (either sellers or buyers) are asking is this the service we should expect after paying so much? Maybe we should use the competition."