Our engineering processes seriously failed this afternoon and cost you and your blogs nearly 4 hours of downtime and almost 100 million views.
Painfully, this isn’t the first time this winter I’ve had to give you similar news.
When incidents like this happen, our entire engineering team comes online to support the recovery as needed. Immediately after, we begin taking every measure to protect from the uncovered issue in the future.
We are constantly working to shore up our processes and solidify the stability of this quickly growing network, even more so as we’ve fallen behind the last few weeks.
Tumblr’s success is supporting your success, and we take this mission very seriously.
This was a rough one. As Hacker News points out, they had to shut off the DNS to fix it.
Props to Tumblr for giving us advance notice of downtime, and also timing it for a period when things should be quiet anyway. This is a change.
He hopes to be making money this year. Tumblr recently launched a directory where bloggers could pay for listings. The $5 slots sold out too fast, so the company pulled the feature and plans to relaunch it soon with more categories and a bidded marketplace.
So essentially, the reason the directory disappeared from the home page was not because it was a bad feature that they were getting rid of, but because they weren’t properly monetizing it. Also of note: The overarching theme is that David Karp was in over his head and ran his company very frugally for a long time … a frugality that led to Tumblr’s downtime in October.
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