Let’s be honest here. Three hours of downtime for a site like eBay is near death in lost sales and productivity for their Web services. Still, it could also translate into a real wakeup call for the auction giant.

eBay fell over today following a power outage at its main web host in San Francisco.

A spokesman for the giant auction site said all of eBay’s sites were hit by the three-hour downtime.

In a statement the company said: “In the early hours of this morning, a primary hosting provider for eBay in the San Francisco Bay Area of California experienced a power outage, and all site functions were temporarily down.

“eBay has been working with our hosting vendor to fully restore the site. As of 06:10 BST all listings were available to view and bid on, however, some other site functions remained intermittently available.”

The spokesman confirmed that the service is now up and running again as normal. [Read the rest]