Boy does it suck to be Tumblr right now. The blogging service has been down for roughly half a day (yes, that would be 12 13 14 15 21 hours) now, due to a “major issue in one of its database clusters”. There are no more details available at this point, and a request for more information wasn’t immediately responded to.
Tumblr’s many users are understandably very frustrated and taking to Twitter and Facebook to voice their displeasure – some of them went to bed last night around the time the service went down and woke up this morning to see their beloved blogs are still not available.
Of course, technical difficulties are part of the game, and Twitter has proven that even unreliable services can maintain a growing user base if the value for the users remains apparent. But I don’t think even Twitter has ever been down for more than 12 hours.
Tumblr may be a free service, but these days, that’s not nearly enough to calm the mob.
Or as one user eloquently put it in the comment section below: “TUMBLR. Y U NO WORK.”
Meanwhile, Tumblr is raising a ton of money – we’re hearing tens of millions of dollars at a $120 million to $150 million pre-money valuation – as they prepare to hire a bunch more people to staff its brand new New York offices.
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By the looks of it, they desperately need to.
Update from founder David Karp:
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.
