We reported earlier this evening that popular blogging engine, Tumblr, was suffering from another outage, as users across the country were reporting slow loading, intermittent errors on pages and total Tumblr darkness. The company almost immediately confirmed the issue, reporting via Twitter that it had “taken the site down in order to resolve a network issue.”
While Tumblr didn’t offer any reasons as to why it was forced to take the site down, it finally offered an update, saying that dashboards were on their way back up and that other features would be rolling out incrementally. As of now, while still a little slow, Tumblr is officially back up and operational (at least for TechCrunchers).
Again, the company still hasn’t offered a comprehensive explanation of its “network issues,” especially as to whether or not the outage is connected to the Tumblr worm loosed by a group of miscreants that wreaked havoc across the site last week. The two may be unrelated, but what is certain is that this was not planned or scheduled downtime for site maintenance.
It could simply be a result of the massive scale that Tumblr has achieved over the last year, as CEO David Karp said a few weeks ago that the site now reaches an audience of 170 million people and now sees 202.6 million visits per month in the U.S. and 616.8 worldwide.
[Update: A Tumblr Spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the two are in fact “unrelated.”
As to why the issue has taken so long to resolve? The company said via Twitter that progress has been slowed by “affected caching servers” and that blogs were slowly coming back online as those caches warmed up. That was just about two hours ago, and it appears that, in the interim, the majority of blogs and dashboards have been restored.
We’ll update when we learn more, specifically in regard to the causes behind The Great Tumblr Darkness of December 12th.
Find the restored Tumblr here.