Sellers demand compensation from eBay over outage in Europe

Millions across Europe were left with no access to auction site eBay after it went down yesterday. A number of sellers are demanding  compensation from eBay, complaining that most of northern Europe had not be able to bid on any items.

The prolonged downtime, lasting from early in the morning until mid-afternoon, was the tenth time the site had gone down this year. The latest incident however, was the longest to date, with eBay unable to offer any explanation as to why the site had not been available for so long.

The website, though, was not down for everyone in the UK, with people still able to connect using mobile broadband or using the eBay app. According to the auction site, the website had been running normally by 12:40pm BST, but some users still complained they were not able to access it.

This auction site said earlier in the day, that it was "investigating reports" that some customers could not get on the site.

The company said in a statement that it could not speculate on the cause of the downtime, nor did it confirm how widespread it was.

Meanwhile, The Inquirer reported that search on Twitter suggested that there was patchwork availability all over, and this had been confirmed by eBay.

"We are investigating reports that certain eBay features are intermittently unavailable or slow and we apologise for any inconvenience caused," it said in a statement. The firm had  promised that more information would be provided on it soon.

According to The Inquirer, the problems had been confirmed by website availability assessment website Downdetector.

The site said that this was the 10th time that the website had been unavailable to users in 2014, and that it was the longest so far.

"Today's outage marks the largest outage for Ebay users in the UK for this year, both in terms of duration of the problems and the number of users that are impacted," said Tom Sanders, co-founder of Downdetector.

Meanwhile, eBay in an email to The Inquirer said, "eBay is aware that some users are experiencing problems accessing eBay in Europe. We are doing all we can to investigate this issue including reviewing third-party internet service provider access issues and we are working hard to put things right."