eBay's ProStores service had an outage on Tuesday evening that knocked merchant websites offline for hours. Customers who use eBay's ProStores service to host their websites will receive a 100 percent credit for any Successful Transaction Fees charged in May 2008 "as a token of our appreciation for their patience and loyalty," according to spokesperson Usher Lieberman.

According to a post on the ProStores Announcement board, the issue was caused by a third party vendor that ProStores contracts with for data needs who had an issue with their fire suppression system that affected all ProStores merchants' stores as well as ProStores tech support phone lines (http://discussionboard.prostores.com/forumdisplay.php?f=51).

ProStores went down again on Wednesday, and when it came back online, an announcement said ProStores was investigating the issue.

The eBay subsidiary said its network would be shut down on May 29 at 6:00am Eastern for 20 minutes to fix the problem, at which time all ProStores web stores would be offline.

Comment on the AuctionBytes Blog:
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/5/1211946026.html