Auction site eBay had a 90-minute outage Thursday, the first significant computer systems problem the company has seen in about a year. The cause of the outage wasn"t released.
eBay said the site was "intermittently unavailable" between 1:10 p.m. and 2:40 p.m. PT, according to a note posted on the site. Performance management company Keynote Systems said the system began to stall at 1 p.m. PT, with only 8 percent of the log-on attempts succeeding, before becoming completely inaccessible by 2 p.m. PT, according to spokeswoman Mary Lindsay.
"We have identified and corrected the issue, and all pages are once again accessible," the note read. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
The company said the outage affected static pages on its site, including the eBay.com home page. In an earlier note to consumers during the outage, the company said people could still bid, sell and browse listings. But visitors who tried to go in via the front door were unable to reach any auctions.
This year, eBay is in the process of one of its most significant technological upgrades, installing eBay"s "V3" next-generation shopping technology, which will include real-time updates for eBay"s data warehouse and minute-by-minute updates for listings, currently updated once per hour.