It’s been a pretty frustrating weekend for users of the popular LocalBitcoins.com.
On Saturday, the site — which allows users from around the world to buy and sell bitcoins from other nearby users — went down quite suddenly. Shortly thereafter, the company released information indicating the outage related to a possible hardware issue.
On Sunday, much progress hadn’t been made. At approximately 10:30 AM, the company announced via their Twitter feed that it would be at least another eight hours until recovery — but that proved to be an understatement.
This morning, LocalBitcoins.com made the following statement on their Twitter feed:
“Unfortunately we haven’t made any significant progress yet. We are expecting additional 24h downtime. Staying up for update 24/7.”
Within the last couple of hours, however, significant progress has been made. In fact, the website is one again accessible, though LocalBitcoins warns that some website functionality may be disabled temporarily.
Humorously, the team posted a picture of a meal with the caption “LocalBitcoins.com, site resurrect operation, almost there” (picture above).
Specific details on what caused the lengthy outage are not yet available, but the latest hint provided was that it had something to do with network hardware.
Other recent issues include problems with the service’s API, which is still being worked on at this juncture.
LocalBitcoins.com says that no user funds or data has been compromised, as this downtime is not the result of anything malicious. Unfortunately, some times these things happen and the only thing that can be done is to try and resolve them as quickly as possible.
For additional information and further updates, you’re welcome to monitor the LocalBitcoins.com Twitter account feed and the company’s blog. We would imagine a “post-mortem” report will be released in the near future once they’re back to full capacity.