E*Trade Outage Adds to Recent E-Commerce Woes

E-commerce suffered another public relations blow Friday.

E*Trade (EGRP Quote) customers trying to buy and sell shares were locked out of trading for most of Friday due to technical problems -- the second major service problem for E*Trade this year.

The outage follows a 22-hour outage on June 10 and 11 at online auction house eBay (EBAY Quote). That prompted calls for eBay and other online companies to beef up technology spending. Schwab (SCH Quote), for example, announced last month a deal with IBM (IBM Quote) that will boost its capacity. And E*Trade spent $15 million on technology during the second quarter, double the year-earlier quarter's total and up from $14 million in the previous quarter. It's scheduled to report third-quarter earnings on July 19. ...