Bitfinex, the largest bitcoin USD exchange went down last night due to problems at their datacenter. At least that is the explanation posted by Bitfinex. The exchange posts update on its https://bitfinex.statuspage.io page. This is the best place to exchange updates, but its also worthwhile to keep up some Google news searches as well as follow some msg boards. A casual glance at the statuspage.io shows a huge jump in the response time. The biggest jump ever on Bitfinex.
The downtime at Bitfinex is probably a strong contributor to the fall of the price of bitcoin, which according to CoinDesk is trading down more than 8% against the USD. Conversely, the price of Ether is way up against bitcoin today as a soft fork looks likely for the DAO.
