• "Squirrels" And 100 Other Reasons Why Tumblr Is Down

    Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    With Tumblr recently experiencing a 24-hour offline stint and a reported single 9 of service reliability, there are plenty of jokes about the microblogging service’s infamous downtime (most I’ve heard have at least a tenuous WikiLeaks connection).

    Here’s the most elaborate Tumblr satire piece yet: Go to http://wellbebackshortly.com/ and hit refresh. Hit refresh again, and again.

    Created by Adam Hemphill, the site is a riff on the Tumblr “We’ll Be Back Shortly” page and generates over a hundred hypothetical excuses as to why Tumblr is down so Tumblr doesn’t have to. (Tumblr is currently UP, at the moment.)

    Some of the best:

    “Does anyone know how to fix a “database cluster”? #lazyweb”

    “Cocaine is a hell of a drug”

    “Squirrels”

    “We’re a free service. Goddamn.”

    “Did we mention we re-hired Jakob Lodwick this weekend?”

    “The rent is too damn high”

    “I am away from my computer right now.”

    “Eduardo froze the accounts”

    Oh hell, every single one of these is good. See for yourself.

    Squirrel teaser image: Buzzfeed

    Company: Tumblr
    Website: tumblr.com
    Funding: $125M

    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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