Having some trouble reaching LocalBitcoins.com? If so, is it just really slow? You’re not the only one.
The popular service — which connects buyers and sellers of bitcoin from around the world — is seemingly having technical issues once again, in what is yet another long outage that is frustrating users.
Upon accessing the site (by our experimentation here), the end user is provided with a cached version of the website from Cloudflare, a denial-of-service protection and content delivery network (also in use by NEWSBTC along with many other websites on the web).
The message:
This page (https://localbitcoins.com/) is currently offline. However, because the site uses CloudFlare’s Always Online™ technology you can continue to surf a snapshot of the site. We will keep checking in the background and, as soon as the site comes back, you will automatically be served the live version.
Whilst writing this post, the site came back online, but is very slow.
Our language in this post alluded to a previous outage, which took place just a couple of weeks ago. The service was down for en entire weekend. We learned from the team that the outage then was caused by a hardware failure in the network.
Unfortunately this time around we have no indication as to what has caused this outage/degraded performance, aside from the fact it started on Sunday evening (Eastern U.S. time).
The company has not made any statement regarding the outage on any of their social media channels that we could find (and we looked on Twitter, Facebook, and their official blog).
Not surprisingly, users aren’t happy.
“Becoming a daily affair,” wrote a user on social sharing website Reddit.com. “Really sad, especially now with the price rising and [newbies] getting into the market. Local should be a reliable tool, but it is far from it.”
“Why do Bitcoin businesses have such a hard time keeping their websites operational?” another asked.
It’s simply too soon to speculate on what could be causing this, but we’ll update you accordingly just as soon as more information becomes available.