Chase Web site breaks down. But why?

When I tried to log into one of my credit-card accounts last night, I was puzzled not to see the usual log-in form on the home page of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Then I saw a notice that the site was "temporarily unavailable" and figured I could just try again tomorrow.

That might take a while longer, as the New York-based firm continues to greet Web visitors with this message: "Our website is temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to restore access. Please log on later."

It seems that the bank--the second-largest in the United States--is suffering the kind of site-wide meltdown that animates the nightmares of information-technology professionals.

Sadly, these things do happen. Sites go down all the time; the world is an imperfect place. (Nobody working at the Post in early 2004 will soon forget the time we somehow neglected to renew our washpost.com domain-name registration.)

But Chase's meltdown has lasted longer than most. And it's had a bigger effect on people who can't check their balances or pay their bills online and have been knocked back to such analog forms of banking as phone calls (Chase's toll-free number is 800-935-9935) and branch visits. People are less inclined to be forgiving when a big part of their financial infrastructure stops working.

So what happened here? A Bloomberg BusinessWeek story quotes Chase spokesman Tom Kelly as saying that the bank is working to fix a "technical problem" that is not further explained. In a phone interview, Kelly didn't expand on that description or offer a time for the site's operation to return (perhaps understandably; those sorts of promises rarely survive contact with reality).

So for now, we can only imagine what happened to Chase's servers. Care to take a guess in the comments?

(9/15, 9:43 a.m. I was able to log into my account again at around 1:20 this morning. Have you been able to get back into the site?)