AUCTIONEERS have emerged from a period of eBay darkness that left them locked out of its pages and kept apart from its customer services systems for some hours.

Autotyping suggestions may soon begin to follow the word 'eBay' with the option 'down'. We report on it often and each time we find that users of the auction site are in apoplexy about the situation.

Usually eBay is pretty reluctant to discuss things like this, but it seems now to have thrown itself into a more transparent response.

The eBay support pages include a note about the situation and the auction site's Facebook page is also graced with a statement.

The support pages offer initial and follow up posts separated by some five hours.

"Due to a technical issue, some eBay customers may notice a problem with key areas of the eBay site. We're working to solve this problem and apologise for any inconvenience. Please try to complete your transaction at a later time," the firm said at around 2.30am PST.

Five hours later, at 7.55am, eBay returned to the page and said that problems should be resolved and that it would be talking to users about the issue. The firm said that the problem started at around 1am, and was settled before 3am.

"Based on our initial investigation, the issue was caused by an isolated network issue at one of our data centres. We quickly took action to re-route traffic to alternative data centres to help restore functionality," eBay said.

"We know any interruption for our users is frustrating and we regret any inconvenience this may have caused to the buyers or sellers involved.

"In the next day or two, eBay will be in touch directly with affected sellers to provide them with additional information."