eBay and PayPal were both down Monday evening after a power outage hit a primary hosting provider for eBay in the Bay Area. eBay will issue credits to sellers for some listings, some of which will be extended by 24 hours.

Shortly before 8pm Pacific time on Monday evening, eBay users began reporting accessibility problems. eBay posted on its General Announcement Boards at 8:18pm the following: "We are aware the site is temporarily unavailable. We're aware of this issue and are working to fix it as quickly as possible" (http://www2.ebay.com:80/aw/marketing.shtml#2005-05-09182021).

eBay updated its message boards at 10:57 to explain that a primary hosting provider for eBay in the San Francisco Bay Area had experienced a power outage, causing all site functions to be temporarily down.

At 2:10 on Tuesday morning, eBay posted another update, and said it would issue credits for auctions affected according to the definition of its outage policy, which applies to any listing scheduled to end during and 1 hour after the outage, and would extend some auctions by 24 hours (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/everyone-outage.html).

eBay explained that listings on its sites are housed in 21 complex databases. Last night's outage affected one group of databases such that they were unavailable from 19:33 PDT until 22:10 PDT. "Since the items in these databases were unavailable for more than 2 hours, eBay will credit all fees associated with these listings. In addition, eBay has extended these listings by 24 hours and added an additional two hours to the credit and extension period."

The outage affected the second group of databases, making them unavailable for less than 2 hours, from 19:33 PDT until 21:15 PDT. "Since these items were unavailable for less than 2 hours, eBay will credit all listing fees associated with these listings, but will not extend the listings. We will also add two hours to the credit period for these listings."

eBay extends the auctions that were scheduled to end during an outage because in many cases, most bidding activity occurs during the last minutes of an auction. eBay explains in its outage policy that after the listing end times have been reset, eBay updates search and listing indexes. "Until these index updates are completed, these listings will be unavailable via search or listings. This re-indexing can take a few hours."

eBay also explains that sellers who are satisfied with the bidding activity before the extended listing end time may end their listing at any time (http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/end_early.html), although the policy says you may not end the listing in the final 12 hours.

eBay's outage policy also says sellers may also choose to cancel their auctions (http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CancelBidShow).

eBay said PayPal was temporarily unavailable from 21:13 PT to 21:41 PT on Monday evening.