[Update: As of 6:40 p.m. PST last night, the site was back up and running, but it appears to be down again this Thursday morning, as of at least 6:10 a.m. PST.] Lending Club’s site has gone down tonight, prompting at least one nervous investor to tweet out his concern that “[a]s a long time investor there, I am worried that they have closed down.” An automated voicemail message states that the company’s customer service is now closed, per its usual business hours, which end at 5 pm PST. But the company itself tweeted at roughly 4:30 p.m. PST that it’s working to resolve a data center outage. The outage comes at a strange time for the publicly traded company. Its shares rose today after Reuters reported that recently ousted CEO and founder Renaud Laplanche may be planning a takeover with the help of unnamed private equity firms and banks. Likely, the online lending company is a takeover target either way. Less than a month ago, the company revealed in an SEC filing that in the wake of Laplanche’s departure, investors who “contributed a significant amount of funding” for loans are now examining that performance “or are otherwise reluctant to invest.” On Tuesday, the company raised interest rates for nearly all borrowers in a bid to “boost the attractiveness of the asset to investors,” it said in a new SEC filing. Whether that move is enough to assuage growing concerns remains to be seen. In the meantime, Lending Club — worth $9 billion at the time of its late 2014 IPO and $1.5 billion today — remains in a compromised position, one that may have more traditional banks with older and less agile technology wondering whether they should take advantage of it.
The website for LendingClub went down for roughly 4:30 p.m. PST, causing concern for investors given the recent internal probe, which resulted in the ousting of the company's CEO. One investor tweeted that “As a long time investor there I am worried that they have closed down…” however LendingClub responded quickly stating that it was resolving a power outage in a data centre. The website is now back up and running.