'altbinz' isn't down, you might be confusing altbinz (the program) with newzleech (the search engine), which is one of the search engines altbinz can use.
In which case, they're not down but they did change their layout so altbinz doesnt understand the new layout, yet.
If you're using v0.25 you can use the newzleech.com website to generate/get nzbs, store them in a folder, and have altbinz auto load nzbs from that folder.
or, if you're a donator you can use one of the other search engines until newzleech' new layout is supported. (binsearch and nzbindex seem to be reliable for me, binaries.nl doesn't give very relevant results for some reason.)