I've been reading some of the past posts here to get an idea of why this is happening. So far the story is that it seems to be caused by DDoS attacks on the exchanges, some issues with 3rd parties / APIs failing, user faults, and sometimes bad or non existant support.

But some questions have come up...

Yankee -

When a purchase transaction that should have never even been accepted by the system (when system is clearly inoperable) in the first place is automatically (and/or predictably) failed, does BitInstant lock you into that exact time's bitcoin price? On which exchange - MtGox?

Does this work both ways, if the price later increases or decreases?

What if after 48h the price drops or increases dramatically?

Why are failed transactions delayed so long, it seems that other transaction go through, but the ones that failed are scheduled to be pushed much much later on? The only way I can explain this and make sense of the comment that the exchange api failed earlier, is if you don't really buy in real-time on the exchanges, you just give out from your own coin reserves, and later on in the night or day cover your own position on different exchanges and however else for your advantage - in the hopes of making a profit on it. But this way, I still don't see why similar transactions fail and suceed at the same time.

Is BitInstant still accepting transaction that it can't complete?

When will this all be cleared up (the simple cash to coin transactions at least)? When the DDoS ends (hasn't it yet)?

EDIT/UPDATE - Issue resolved.