Real estate brokerage site Redfin suffers outage

Zillow has gone public. Trulia just announced it was going public. Redfin, another established online real estate brokerage, hasn't announced any plan to go public yet, but it is making news. The site went down for several hours Saturday morning, keeping weekend home shoppers in the dark.

The company posted a tweet to explain its troubles: "We are having a little Saturday morning tussle with our master database; we're working on it and will be back up as soon as we can."

Update, 11:05 a.m. PT: Redfin sent the following statement to CNET, referring, in one instance, to the site's recent redesign:

--The site was down for about four hours, from 4:15 a.m. to about 8:15 a.m. PT

--Importantly, it had nothing to do with the new page design.

--The master database machine crashed, and the fallback to a different master failed. The next backup procedure was more time consuming.

--We don't know yet what caused the initial problem, but naturally we are looking into that now.