Facebook and eBay suffer interruptions

By Verne KopytoffSenior Editor, Tech
Verne KopytoffSenior Editor, Tech

Verne Kopytoff is a senior editor at Fortune overseeing trends in the tech industry. 

US-IT-INTERNET-FACEBOOK
This February 25, 2013 photo taken in Washington, DC, shows the splash page for the Internet social media giant Facebook. AFP PHOTO / Karen BLEIER (Photo credit should read KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo by Karen Bleier AFP—Getty Images

For a few minutes on Wednesday, Facebook users had to do without seeing updates about their friends’ babies and snapshots of their dinners.

An outage took down the service for many people starting at around 3:40 ET. It was restored after about 20 minutes.

In a statement, Facebook(FB) said: “Earlier today we encountered an error while making an infrastructure configuration change that briefly made it difficult for people to access Facebook. We immediately discovered the issue and fixed it, and everyone should now be able to connect.”

The service also experienced a series of outages in May, June and August.

Additionally, eBay said on Wednesday afternoon that some of its users were having trouble logging into the service. The company emphasized that the problem impacted only a portion of its users and that most were unaffected.

“Based on our initial investigation, this appears to be the result of technical issues that occurred during scheduled server maintenance,” eBay said in a notice on its website. It went on to say that “we’re working to resolve this issue quickly.”

(Story was updated with a comment from Facebook, details about a separate outage at eBay, and a new headline)