Ebay programmers are effectively shutting down their own business, at least over Europe as they react to hackers raiding their database of passwords.

Ebay thought it would be a genius plan to force users to change their passwords by taking them to a screen to do it when they attempt to log in. The only problem is that they do not appear to have encoded the system to realise that someone has changed their password already.

As a result a person who changes their password is taken back to a screen which asks them to change their password again. Meanwhile users cannot do what they want to do on ebay such as buy and sell products.

“Ebay’s own programmers have done more damage to the company that any hacker could,” said one angry user who has been shut out of her dream box, which is a capital offence in Italy.

We wrote to Ebay to ask them about the problem and they appear to have ignored us. So far we have had two reports of people being locked out by Ebay’s autocratic password changing system one in the UK and one in Italy.