eBay reported a serious outage for all auctions in the Clothing & Accessories category and in the Jewelry, Gems and Watches category. Auctions in those categories were completely unavailable for most of the day, starting at approximately 9 am PST. As a result, eBay said it will extend by 24 hours those auctions scheduled to end during the outage or one hour after the outage. eBay will also credit all associated fees of listed items since the outage lasted more than two hours. eBay's Outage Policy may be viewed at http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-extn.html.

In related news, eBay revised its "Board Usage Policy" for all of its public chat, help and discussion boards. The revised policy may be viewed at http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-board.html and goes into effect as of Friday, April 5. A workshop to answer questions about the new policy will be held on April 10 at 8pm EST on the Workshop board. Go to "Community" then "Chat" in the Navigation Bar, where there is a link to the Workshop board on the left side of the page.