[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.”
@cheddartv @lendingclub ‘s site + phone down! As a long time investor there I am worried that they have closed down. Please investigate?
— Eric Fader (@efader) June 8, 2016
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.
We’re working to resolve a data center outage & our website is currently down. Sorry for any inconvenience- we’ll be back up & running soon!
— Lending Club (@LendingClub) June 8, 2016
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.