Tumblr Suffers 24-Hour Outage

Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, is finally up and running again after more than 24 hours of downtime. Technical issues took down the entire infrastructure and engineers scrambled to fix the problems and get the site back up. Unfortunately, the recovery process was a long one as the engineers had to manually rebuild the database cluster.

"Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster," Tumblr founder David Karp explained.

"This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online," he said.

He added that this type of outage and some of the issues that have popped up on Tumblr lately are unacceptable for the team and indicating that they will not become a common occurrence.

"We can’t apologize enough, nor can we thank you enough for putting up with these growing pains... But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it," he said.

The problem, acknowledged by Tumblr, is that the site hasn't been keeping up with growth. The blogging platform has seen quite a lot of new users, especially this year, and is now getting some 500 million page views per month.

The site had been operating with a small team, but is now expanding to better manage the number of users it's seeing. Tumblr says that its engineering team grew four times in the past month alone.

The $20 million to $30 million in funding it received very recently should help with that and are the reason why the company started adding new employees. Tumblr closed its latest funding round less than a couple of weeks ago valuating the company at an estimated $130 million.