A public service announcement for anyone trying to use the Blockchain.info website this evening. The site, as you may have noticed, is down — showing “We Will Be Back Shortly” to anyone who visits.
According to Blockchain.info, the downtime relates to a database issue:
We are experiencing a database issue at the moment and may take a several hours to come back fully online. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Thankfully, Blockchain.info has a very competent and experienced staff, so it should only be a short matter of time before services are restored to a normal state.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a block explorer, you can check out Blockr.io. Additionally, you can monitor developments on the downtime either via the Blockchain.info Twitter account or their official blog.
Updated statement from Blockchain.info:
Blockchain is experiencing a technical issue that has forced us to
temporarily interrupt services. The outage was caused by a bug in some
database handling code. We are working hard to fix the issue and restore
service as soon as possible, but anticipate the outage may last more
than an hour, as it requires restarting database servers with very large
data sets. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this recent
outage has caused you.Please rest assured that your wallets are safe and this outage does not
affect the security of funds or the completion of executed transactions.
Our preference is not to take Blockchain.info down without announcement,
but the situation that presented itself made it necessary. We will
update you as soon as our services are back online.We are working hard to improve the resilience and continuity of our
services and are investing in software, hardware and operations to
minimize and then eliminate such outages, even while we increase the
scale of our service which is growing at an exponential rate.The outage is completely unrelated to a previous problem with
SharedCoin, which was resolved shortly before this unrelated
issue emerged.Thank you for your patience!
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Chief Security Officer
Blockchain Limited