eBay's ProStores is experiencing an outage that appeared to start as early as 4 am this morning. Online sellers use the service to host their independent websites, which are inaccessible due to the outage. Merchants report they are unable to gain access to their sites or administration pages.

Sellers are communicating via Twitter about the problem since the discussion boards are also hosted on the ProStores servers. One seller tweeted, "Naturally, I can't easily look up the phone number for ProStores support, because it's listed on their site, which is also down. Arghhh!"

UPDATE: ProStores is back online this morning. The company posted about the issue on its Announcement Board: "ProStores Staff is aware of a connection issue currently being experienced on the ProStores platform. Staff are currently working to address the issue. Should any additional information become available, this announcement will be updated. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue." As of 11:20 am EST, ProStores.com is accessible, but there are access issues with individual stores.