I do not completely agree if they say it is due to technical issue. No matter what kind of technical issue is, it cannot be 'that' big that needs many days for them to sort out and process btc withdrawals. there should be something else in the background.
Given the high credibility of Mt Gox, We can't rule out their version of technical issues. There are some technical glitches like Architecture flaws, Performance/scalability, Security issues which are hard to find and fix them. In most cases, the fix for critical bugs would be either 1 or 2 lines of code change and it takes just 5 minutes to fix them but identifying the problem may take from days to weeks.
See the following comment from a CSO. I will hope they will come out clean on this by monday. It will put a FULLSTOP to all FUD
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One prominent technical member of the bitcoin community thinks he knows what’s behind the current withdrawal freeze. Andreas Antonopoulos, who recently joined Blockchain.info as chief security officer, says he has studied exchange technologies over the past 15 years. His verdict on Gox’s withdrawal freeze, as an outsider, is scathing:
“Mt. Gox has built an exchange based on a hodgepodge of technologies that are really not suitable for running an exchange. And it’s being run by people who don’t really have experience building and operating scalable systems.”
Antonopoulos outlined what he believes to be the technical reasons behind the Gox freeze. The root of the problem lies in its decision to use a version of the bitcoin client it customised itself, rather than the standard client. As a result, Gox handles the protocol with some discrepancies.
One of those discrepancies, as Antonopoulos understands it, is the way transactions are propagated through the network. A miner on Gox, for example, will prematurely be credited for a new block before the network has a chance to confirm the transaction. As a result, when the transaction hits the bitcoin network to be corroborated, it is rejected. Gox’s solution is to cancel the initial transaction and resubmit it until it is approved.
“This is like putting a Band-Aid on the problem. Gox should not be generating non-standard transactions in the first place. Band-Aids like this will further exacerbate scalability problems,” Antonopoulos said.
In the case of the mining example, the cancelled and resubmitted transactions cause delays in fulfilling withdrawal requests within Gox. This doesn’t necessarily cause huge problems unless the system is under pressure from an external factor, like a spike in withdrawal requests, for example.
“When transactions increase, then there are more delayed transactions, which can cause a panic. It just snowballs,” Antonopoulos said.
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