Somebody get OJ on the line, more juice is needed in the auction sector. Yesterday, online auction giant had some power trouble and went offline for a little over an hour, posting the message:

“eBay experienced a power outage at a principal hosting facility in the Bay Area. Some eBay functions and listings are now available, and we are working to fully restore the rest of the site.”

This reminded me of a recent story I read where one of the challenges that Google was having wasn’t with storage, it was power: they needed more power. Start chaining together enough servers and eventually power consumption becomes a much bigger concern. And how do you backup power? (And yes, I have heard of UPS)

Predictably at least a few customers — annoyed by the seller fees that were raised some 60% in February — were upset by the outage.