A couple of days ago, the company set out to improve the performance of both the hardware and software that powers their website. Instead, the site update knocked the website down cold, and they’ve been having trouble getting it back online ever since.

When you go to the crowdsourcing startup’s website now, you’ll be forwarded to a message hosted on subdomain apology.crowdspring.com that reads:

In an effort to improve speed and stability, we began pushing a site update this morning at 9am CST. Unfortunately, this means that we needed to bring the site offline and this process may take as long as 24 hours (although we swear to all things good and holy that we hope it takes less).

We truly, truly apologize for the inconvenience but we also truly, truly hope that you’ll find the site much more well behaved after this update. If you have a project that will be affected by this, or if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll do absolutely anything we can to help. We’ll be more than happy to extend any project affected by this outage or find other creative solutions to minimize the impact on you, so don’t hesitate to ask.

It has taken way more than 24 hours, though. The latest update posted on their Twitter account mentioned that they’ll be back in business on Sunday after getting some rest.

Downtime’s never fun, and it happens to the best of us, but posting an update that you’re tired and going to sleep before doing some final site testing is simply unprofessional.

Maybe they should have crowdsourced for some help while they were going to bed.

(Thanks for the tip, Brandon)

CrowdSPRING is very similar to other crowdsourcing sites like Kluster, Cambrian House, and FellowForce. It offers an online environment for people to collaborate and contribute new design ideas. Companies can set up challenges with prizes to see what the crowd comes up with. CrowdSPRING is focused primarily on creating logos, Website designs, and marketing materials.

“What we believe is that there is a huge pool of talent out there that is untapped and cannot compete effectively in a traditional model,” says co-founder Mike Samson. To choose the crowdSPRING logo, for instance, Samson and his co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky created a contest. After they selected the winning design, they found out it was created by a 28-year-old janitor in Ottawa who taught himself graphic design.

How CrowdSPRING differs from most other crowdsourcing sites is that contributors must put up completed works, not just concepts. It is not so much about people working together to improve a single design, but rather to put up their own work in competition with everyone else’s. (See my recent write-up of Kluster, for a comparison of how a more collaborative approach can work). Since everyone can see everyone else’s project, they are still informed by each other’s work. “A funneling effect takes place,” says Kimbarovsky. This avoids design by committee, while still allowing one design to inform another. But it may also discourage the most talented contributors who might value their time too much to whip up an entire design for free before knowing whether there will be any takers.

Intellectual property protections are built into the system. (Samson is a former trial attorney). Your design belongs to you until the company that set up the challenge decides to buy it. CrowdSPRING takes a 15 percent fee. The company is based in Chicago and has raised $3 million in angel funding.

Come up with a better Website design than the ones below and you can win $5,000.