eBay's home page was inaccessible for nearly 5 hours on Monday. Sellers were fuming when the announcement included no mention of refunds for affected auctions. "If you can't get to eBay's home page, how can you do a title search? I personally have asked for a refund on a couple affected auctions but have yet to hear a response" said one seller.

eBay's announcement said that "from 06:55 PDT to 11:45 PDT, some eBay users experienced difficulty accessing certain eBay functions, including the eBay Home Page and site navigation. In addition, many users reported issues with site slowness. These issues have been resolved, and full access has been restored to all users."

No reason was given for the technical glitch, and AuctionBytes could not reach eBay Kevin Pursglove for comment. The Wall Street Journal said that, in a voice mail message, Pursglove characterized the site problems as "sluggishness."

Yesterday's problem was one of a series of glitches that have hit the site over the last 2 months. eBay experienced a 90-minute outage in mid-March and also encountered problems when it integrated certain functions of its Half.com fixed-price site into the eBay site in late March. eBay sent emails to some customers after a 9-hour outage in two major categories on April 7th.

eBay's Outage Policy may be viewed at http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-extn.html