eBay outage: UK users fume over login problems

Online auction site eBay has blamed scheduled server maintenance for a glitch that prevented users from across the globe logging into their accounts.

Site members from the UK, US and India reported problems last night when trying to sign into their eBay accounts, and according to reports on the social media the issues appear to be ongoing.

This is despite eBay's message of assurance to users in the early hours of this morning that the problem, which it confirmed was caused by site maintenance, has now been fixed.

"The issue has been resolved and site functionality has now been restored. Based on our initial investigation, this was the result of a technical issue that occurred during scheduled server maintenance," the company said.

According to reports, when users attempted to sign in, they've been presented with messages telling them their account doesn't exist or the password they've entered is incorrect.

Hardly surprising, given the number of people who solely rely on (or supplement their) income through eBay activity, the downtime has prompted calls from some users for compensation.

In a move, possibly to pre-empt this, eBay added: "While many users were unaffected, we know any interruption for our users is frustrating, and we know some of our affected users may have questions about their selling activity.

"In the coming days, we will provide them with additional information separately on possible fee adjustments and related seller protections.

"We're very sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused to the buyers and sellers involved."

The glitch is the latest in a long line of unfortunate events to befall eBay, and constitutes the 11th major outage to hit the site this year.