eBay down in Europe: Auction site back online after suffering tenth major outage this year

Tchotchkes and trinkets went unsold in the UK for nearly four hours

(EPA)

Online auction site eBay has suffered its tenth outage of the year, with users across Europe complaining about patchy access on 12 August.

“Some users experienced problems accessing eBay in Europe from 08.55am BST until approximately 12.40pm,” said the site in a statement.

“Our technical experts immediately investigated potential causes including third party internet service provider access issues. All eBay sites are working normally and we are sorry for the inconvenience.”

According to Tom Saunders of downdetector.com (a site that tracks website down time by aggregating reports from sites such as Twitter) this outage is the largest for the site this year, “both in terms of duration of the problems and the number of users that are impacted”.

The bad news is the latest in what has been a pretty dismal year for eBay, with the site suffering an attack by the Syrian Electronic Army in February and losing more than 145 million accounts to hackers in May.

The latter attack was thought to be the second largest data breach in US history, with users around the world urged to change their passwords.