Tumblr Outages Now Have a Mascot

Tumblr, one of the most popular blogging platforms nowadays, has recently followed the suggestion of a well-known cartoonist and adopted the sketch of three 'Tumbeasts' to illustrate their downtimes.

Tumblr fans are well aware of the fact that December 2010 brought a 24-hour outage that prevented them from accessing their preferred blogs, while most of these visitors took it to Twitter to express their discontent, to put it mildly.

It now appears as if the company is trying to make things easier for everyone should this type of events take place again (though surely nobody wants to go through such a long period of malfunction ever again or Tumblr might start to lose its credibility).

On Tuesday, Matthew Inman, better known by his nickname, The Oatmeal, presented the cartoon in one of his strips while also asking Tumblr ('Please use it. Please oh please.') to officially integrate it in their platform.

Within a few hours, the artist posted an update to his initial post, stating that his creation had been adopted and that it would be displayed whenever an outage occurs.

It should be mentioned that the text of the cartoon was a little modified from the original one, as the Tumblr team probably considered that 'Tumbeasts that roam our datacenter' has a more professional ring than 'TumblBeasts who live in our server closet.'

What actually matters is that, from now on, whenever the blogging service undergoes either a scheduled or an unexpected outage, visitors will be welcomed by these cute Tumbeasts, just like the fail whale is used by Twitter or the panda Pickles by Grooveshark.

Even though these cartoons do not actually solve the problem nor do they offer any assistance to users, they do bring about a smile on everybody's face and help them less upset or frustrated.

Furthermore, they gradually become a symbol of the service they illustrate and become easily recognizable wherever they are encountered over the Internet.