A bad news for Bitcoin fans and supporters. Some unknown hackers have target one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.net and, as a result, $5M worth of bitcoin have been stolen.

The United Kingdom and Slovenia-based Bitstamp exchange has taken their website offline in order to secure the remaining Bitcoin and making sure the hackers can not access or compromise any more of the remaining amount.

The notice on the site claims only ‘operational wallets’ were compromised on 4th January, but to avoid any further breach; the site will remain offline. All users have been notified about the breach via email.

On January 4th, some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC. Upon learning of the breach, we immediately notified all customers that they should no longer make deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses, according to the notice.

Full message is available below: Nejc Kodrič , Bitstamp’s CEO apologised the Bitcoin users on Twitter, making it sure that the company is doing everything to get the culprits.

My sincerest apologies to those who are affected by our service being temporary suspended. Details: http://t.co/SzgFNa1NEM — Nejc Kodrič (@nejc_kodric) January 5, 2015

Thank you all for your patience, we are working diligently to restore service and hope to have an ETA later today. — Nejc Kodrič (@nejc_kodric) January 5, 2015

This is not the first time when hackers have compromised such a large amount of Bitcoin, in fact, Bitcoin is in all sorts of trouble these days with its Pioneer Charlie Shrem sent to 2 years in prison and previous Silk Road 2.0 breach in which $2.5 million in Bitcoins were Stolen last year. In 2013, hackers defaced BitcoinTalk.org; putting almost 150,000 user emails and passwords for sale.

It was again in 2013 when $12,000 Worth Of Bitcoins were stolen in a DNS Attack.

At the time of publishing this article, the bitstamp.net was still under maintenance.