Popular blogging service Tumblr is finally recovering from its seemingly endless downtime. The final tally: over 24 hours, based on the tweet Tumblr sent out around 4PM PST yesterday announcing that it was “working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters.” Tumblr followed that up over the ensuing day with some intermittent (and overly optimistic) status updates, and tweeted an hour ago that “All blogs are online and we’re incrementally restoring access to the Dashboard.”
Note that Tumbr isn’t fully functional yet, as only some users can add content to their sites now. But at least visitors aren’t getting an error message any more.
Obviously this was a horrible day for the startup, which is raising a big new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It’s usually a big deal when popular platforms go down for an hour or two — I can’t remember hearing about a site as popular as Tumblr going down for a full day. The site has a famously small headcount — hopefully the new funding will help it ensure this was a one-time issue.
Tumblr founder David Karp gave this statement about the downtime last night; we’ll update once the site posts an overview of what happened:
Some scheduled maintenance yesterday that wasn’t intended to interrupt service went haywire and wound up taking down a critical database cluster. Rebuilding the entire cluster has been a painfully slow and manual process, but we’re almost through. We’ll be posting a recap when we’re back up.
Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...
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