Quote from: Mt.Gox_Alex on April 12, 2013, 03:13:14 AM

https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130412.html

As announced yesterday, (https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html) we have decided last night (https://support.mtgox.com/entries/21519569-Market-Cooldown-for-12-hours) to shutdown all trades for 12hrs.

This decision was made based on two major factors.

1. Trade Engine Lag
We have seen an astonishing growth in both volume and number of people joining Mt.Gox and trading on our platform. While we were ready and expected to see the number of new customers and trade rising, we did not anticipate such AMAZING growth that has been partially translated in visible and unbearable trade engine lag.

To fix this issue, we decided to make some major changes in our hardware infrastructure. It is now capable of handling 50 times more of the trades than in the past, giving us more time to release our new and improved trade engine, which is scheduled to be launched within a month.

2. DDoS
We have seen our fair share of DDoS attack in the past, but the sheer volume of the DDoS we received in the past couple of day was rather important with a peak at 80Gbps. Despite our service provider's best effort, we had a lot of difficulties to handle both our user growth and the DDoS.

Whats next?

Technically speaking, we are now ready to better handle our exchange's rapid growth and assure normal operation. As far as the DDoS are concerned, we are still fine-tuning our security features and actively working on implementing a solution that will drastically protect us from such huge attack in the future.
But rest assured that we are taking this situation very seriously, and that we are doing everything in our power to protect the Exchange and your trade from such attacks.

Even as we speak, we are still being attacked by a yet unknown group of people that have clearly an intention in hurting Mt.Gox and Bitcoin as a whole. But rest assured that we are not giving up and are dedicated to win this, one way or another!

What will happen to all the pending trades?

This has been discussed at length here at Mt.Gox. We have decided that we will not flush the order book before trading resumes. We have no intention in proactively clearing peoples order regardless of whats happening, and we will let people be the judge of whats best with their order.
There is no doubt that we are expecting a violent crash of Bitcoin after trading resumes, but we are confident that this Panic Sell will be temporarily and that Bitcoin will rise again.

Also active immediately, we will waive all trading fees for the next 48hrs (Starting from 11am today JST).

Finally

Again, thank you for your continued support. Despite suffering one of the most impressive DDoS that we ever seen, we are doing everything in our power to overcome this situation and to restore stability and confidence in our exchange.

Regards
Mt.Gox Co. Ltd Team.

Mt.Gox Contact press@mtgox.com

1st: Don't make promises you can't keep.
2nd: You've already broken your assurance: your website doesn't load. All trading is currently halted.
This is an utter embarrassment.

You should offer a whole month free of commissions... and even then we wouldn't be even.