eBay Glitches Frustrate Users

Friday, August 11th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) â€” The latest in a series of technical glitches in eBay's computer systems has frustrated users and brought business on the online auction site to a halt at least twice in recent days.

A project to improve the San Jose, Calif.-based company's systems to keep apace with the growth of the site is being blamed for the problems.

The site has been plagued with outages over the last year, which prompted the company to invest millions of dollars to improve the system.

A recent outage came Wednesday night, when eBay was unusable for 45 minutes. On Thursday, a glitch prevented some users from listing their sale items and others from viewing the bid history of items for sale. EBay said it has corrected these problems.

Site users, meanwhile, vented their frustration on computer message boards.

One user urged his fellow online community members to deluge the company with phone calls and letters, saying e-mails were easily ignored.