I agree few of you mentioned that transaction slowness is really slow. It's my frustration also.
While the actual disruption was likely minimal, the slowdown may indicate that some developers' worst fears were coming true about the virtual currency's usability. If you're trying to buy a coffee with bitcoin, after all, you can't very well stand around for 10 minutes to an hour in the shop.
Transactions are completed once they've been verified by other users and uploaded to the central ledger, or blockchain. Our transaction happens in batches of transactions, called blocks. The current bitcoin protocol says blocks must be smaller than 1 megabyte, a hard-coded restriction that was recently the topic of heated debate in the bitcoin community. The plodding pace of transactions appears to be due to blocks reaching their upper size limit of 1 megabyte with more frequency, and unconfirmed transactions clogging up the "memory pool," a distributed database that lives on every computer running bitcoin software. I have great hope from lightening network which reduce our slowness frustration.