As you may have heard by now, this afternoon, many users have reported being unable to access their favorite mixed media blogging platform, Tumblr. The company confirmed this afternoon that this is not in fact one of the first signs of the Mayan prophesy, tweeting that the site is “currently experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages.”
While comforting to receive this confirmation, Tumblr didn’t offer any explanation as to the cause behind the slow loading and outages. We’ve since learned from a Tumblr spokesperson that the company has “taken the site down in order to resolve a network issue,” and that it will be updating as soon as it knows more.
We’re experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages and are working quickly to restore performance.
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Tumblr (@tumblr) December 12, 2012This comes on the heels of what has been a rough few weeks for Tumblr, as a worm made its way through some prominent Tumblr-hosted publications and blogs last week, including The Verge and CNET. The hack caused an appearance of spam on Tumblr pages, along with insidious and popup messages that were virally circulated across the Tumblr-sphere.
According to Drew’s coverage last week, the hack was reportedly caused by a group of “Internet trolls,” which posted a re-occurring message to many prominent Tumblr sites. To its credit, the company quickly resolved the issue and put up a blog post on the subject to explain what had happened. You would be able to see the post here, if Tumblr weren’t currently down. Isn’t it ironic, dontcha think?
More importantly, Tumblr said that no accounts were compromised and users were told that they were free to go about their usual Tumbleblogging business.
It’s not clear whether today’s “network issue” is connected with last week’s spam, but Tumblr’s response would indicate that, even if not related, the company is taking precautionary measures to ensure the security of user accounts.
We will update as soon as we learn more.
[Photo credit: Flickr, The Next Web]
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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