Posted by The Blogging Desk on Tue, Dec 07, 2010
Tumblr:
Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than500M pageviews each month. But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.
We can’t apologize enough, nor can we thank you enough for putting up with these growing pains. We know how impossibly frustrating it is to see your work offline. But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it.
You could smell the internet tears lasting nearly 24 hours yesterday. If Twitter is what most consider a social forum for posting small 140 character messages of your breakfast, then Tumblr is the forum that lets you write an essay on that breakfast.
Tumblr is an easy to use blogging platform that lets you set-up a website in seconds. You can now write your little heart out about cute adorable kittens, or funny pictures of Kim Jong-il looking at things. Sadly, things came to an abrupt end thanks to an error in Tumblr's cluster of servers. The entire network of blogs were down for 24 hours. Anger and hysteria ensued. Some even wrote open letters.
But, what are we owed from a free service? Anything?
Tumblr is a free blogging service and super simple to use. Do we have a right to get angry if we host a site with them and things are down for an entire day? That could be business lost if your goal is to make monies from your page. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're just posting picture of Kim Jong-il, I'm sure you wouldn't really care that much.
Do hipsters have a right to get upset with Tumblr's lackadaisical communication during the outage, or should they just get along with their lives and possibly shower?
Perhaps Tumblr should have contacted Trigon about the virtualization of their servers. We're able to work with out clients to minimize any downtime, whether it be an off-site disaster recovery center or bringing sandwiches during a server rebuild.