Facebook, eBay, Apple services hit by outages

Users of Facebook, eBay and Apple, experienced disruptions and could not access some parts or all their websites over the past two days, Bloomberg reported.

In a statement on Thursday, Facebook said, its members briefly had difficulty accessing the social-networking service after the site encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change. When the issue came to light, it was quickly fixed, according to the company. eBay added on Thursday that a number of users had had problems signing into its site.

According to the webiste, this appeared to be the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled server maintenance, as per the San Jose, California-based company's website.

According to the company, most of its users were not affected. Facebook and eBay's issues followed one at Apple yesterday, when some users of the iTunes Store might not have been  able to access multiple stores or make purchases, the Cupertino, California-based company said on its website.

According to Apple's site, the interruption occurred from 3:30 pm to 9 pm, according to Apple's site.

California-based Facebook said in an e-mailed statement, ''We apologize for the inconvenience and will thoroughly investigate this issue so we can learn from it and ensure that Facebook is there when people need it, a spokesman at Menlo Park.''

Meanwhile, eBay said the outage that hit some eBay users yesterday was the result of maintenance work on the company's IT infrastructure, Fox News reported.

The timing of the eBay outage, which hit on the anniversary of the company's founding, led to speculation that the San Jose, California-based firm had fallen victim to hackers.

''Today, some eBay users are experiencing issues when signing in to the site,'' said eBay spokesman Ryan Moore, in an email to  FoxNews.com. ''Based on our initial investigation, this appears to be the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled server maintenance.''

According to Moore only a small portion of eBay's users had been affected by the usage.

 ''We're working to resolve this issue quickly and will continue to keep our customers updated,'' he said. ''We apologize for any inconvenience to our users.''

According to one veteran California-based seller who spoke to Fox News  he was ''effectively out of business'' as a result of the outage.

He added, his account was now non-existent, as were the accounts of many others.''

''It is serious and I am out of a job until it is corrected.''

According to the seller, no scheduled maintenance announcement had been listed for Wednesday on the company's Systems Announcement board. He added, the next maintenance was scheduled for Thursday night.