Online auctioneer eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) has experienced
intermittent technical
problems for the past two days. This comes less than a month
after its
service crashed for a day due to a software glitch, a
problem that caused the
company's shares to plunge 18% on June 14.
Starting at around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time Monday, eBay
announced it was
"having intermittent difficulties with our CGI pool of
servers and this is
causing some users to receive error messages." It appeared
to have the
problem under control by around 11 a.m., except that eBay
had to shut down
its listings and search updates, causing a delay in new
listings and a
general slowdown of the site.
eBay shut down the site for four hours early Tuesday morning
to conduct
scheduled maintenance on its servers. Despite the
maintenance downtime,
though, error messages and slowness persisted, and eBay had
to shut down its
server pool for over an hour Tuesday, causing most of its
website to be
inaccessible.