UPDATE: As of 5:30 pm (Pacific) on Monday, April 27. Prosper remains offline.  Prosper has not provided any new information on their site to indicate when they expect to come back online.

After more than 6 months in “exile,” anticipation ran high on Prospers.org this weekend regarding a massively long planned system outage on the Prosper site.

In an effort to better serve you, we are currently working on system updates and configuration changes to our site. We appreciate your patience during this time, and encourage you to return when these changes are complete.

We expect the site to be down both Saturday (4/25/2009) and Sunday (4/26/2009).

While the site is under maintenance, none of your information will be lost or forgotten. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,
Prosper

The user community appeared to believe Prosper was poised to emerge from their “quiet period” and would resume business, assuming the SEC has blessed Prosper’s filing to go legit.

Late Sunday evening, the following note was added to the maintenance page.

NOTE: The system upgrades are taking longer than we expected. We are working to get the site live as soon as possible.

As of Monday, April 27 at 11:30am (Pacific), the site is still down.

Considering Prosper had more than six months to plan for their re-emergence, it appears that Prosper was indeed more concerned about artificially inflating their Google rankings by pumping out meaningless blogs on online dating and prepping for Super Bowl parties.

Prosper’s inability to stage and deploy system upgrades or changes in a competent, professional and timely manner is disturbing, but, sadly, not surprising.

As the Internet evolved, we have become accustomed to a certain speed and efficiency in having transactions completed. Sadly, the justice system is not home to the same experience (yet).

For some of us, the notion of waiting six months before the court will hold its first case management meeting, will come to wear on our patience.

At the same time, it should also bring some level of comfort to those wanting time to pull additional funds out of their Prosper accounts, in the hope of minimizing losses from what is perhaps prematurely seen as the inevitable demise of Prosper.com. If you are not already pulling your free cash out of your account, what are you waiting for? You can’t make loans, you are not being paid interest on your deposit, the SEC just told them to stop selling more loans, and a class action suit has now been filed. Prosper’s future could at this point best be described as “unclear.”

Personally, I am of the opinon that there are indeed viable scenarios under which Prosper could continue to operate. Regardless of the outcome of the proposed class action, however, Prosper has already exposed itself to a number of potentially actionable issues that could seriously impair its business.

Ironically, Prosper put itself in this situation and I am perhaps perplexed that it took this long to get litigation put in process.