Severe weather in San Jose, California on Tuesday morning caused a power outage that led to eBay's web-hosting service, ProStores, going down. Retail sites hosted on ProStores were down as a result of the outage, and the ProStores Discussion Board was also inaccessible.

ProStores executive Lin Shearer issued a statement about the outage on Tuesday morning: "The San Jose area is experiencing a storm-related power outage that is affecting our datacenter. Our backup power systems initially functioned correctly - moving to battery power as a bridge to the generators ­ which then failed to come online. The generators are now up and we are working to get all servers back online. We anticipate having service fully restored within two to three hours. We will be conducting a thorough investigation to determine why the generators did not turn on in order to ensure this doesn't happen again."

The site went down early Tuesday morning and was back online after several hours. Some issues persisted during the day, and at 6:35 pm PST, ProStores issued an update stating that the system appeared to be running stable and that staff would continue to monitor the platform throughout the evening.

AuctionBytes is waiting word on how ProStores will compensate merchants for the outage.

Link to Tuesday outage discussion thread

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