Monday, December 06, 2010

Tumblr Down, Tumblr Up

Image representing Tumblr as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
Business Insider: TUMBLR IS BACK!: an extended outage that started yesterday.... Tumblr's twitter account says: "The recovering database cluster is online and healthy. We're incrementally opening up access to blogs while monitoring performance."
This downtime was significant because (1) it went on and on and on, it lasted a while and (2) enemies of Tumblr had publicly warned a few weeks back that they would take it down. Right now I don't know if the downtime was due to overuse, or some act of those enemies. I am about to go dig up on the story.

If the downtime was due to overuse, that is good news. Twitter went through quite a few of those in 2009. FourSquare had one only a few months back. But if this downtime was due to a hostile act, that is something to worry about. That is the offline equivalent of someone smashing all the windows of your corner store. That is not tech territory. That is law enforcement territory, I believe.

Business Insider: The Idea That Tumblr Has Lost Everything Is "Ridiculous," Says Tumblr
How Tumblr Grew From 450,000 Users To Several Millions
GigaOm: Tumblr Outage Continues — Can It Pull a Twitter and Recover? The Tumblr blog-hosting platform has been down for more than 17 hours, in what appears to be the longest outage in the company’s history ..... some competitors have tried to take advantage of the site’s stumble .... “an issue in one of our database clusters” .... Twitter has shown that even a problem-plagued service can continue to grow if it is popular enough. .... fact that the site has gone down probably isn’t that surprising, given the rapid rate at which it has been growing ...... the site had 1.2 billion pageviews in October, more than four times what it had just six months ago ..... Twitter was also growing at a tremendous rate when it suffered repeated outages in 2008 and 2009 — most of which were also related to its database structure — but the downtime didn’t seem to affect its long-term growth rate. ..... closed a huge new round of funding last month — estimated at $30 million .... Sequoia .... would value the company at close to $135 million. ...... Posterous and WordPress .... the “reblog” button .... blogging equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, or Twitter’s “re-tweet” function .... Tumblr is playing in a fairly competitive space, and needs to be careful not to alienate a core group of users. And if there has been permanent data loss, that could definitely happen.
Looks like this downtime was technical. No attack. Well then the real story is there is going to be another downtime like this one a few months down the line. What is Tumblr going to do about it now? Beforehand?

ReadWriteWeb: Why a Day of Tumblr Down Time Matters to the Entire Web & World "Does anyone outside Bay Area and NYC care? More at 11." .... one person's silly diversion is another person's life-changing communication channel to the world .... we suffer withdrawal when our publishing tool of choice goes down .... When I can't speak to my social contacts, when I can't express myself in ways I've grown accustomed to, when I can't learn what the thoughtful people in my life are saying and sharing, it honestly feels like I've lost the glasses on my face that I've grown accustomed to seeing the world better through. ...... If Facebook ever went down for a day? Cities would shake. ..... Democratic discourse, the marketplace of ideas, the rational processes through which we individually and collectively make decisions, the expansiveness of our own horizons - all of those things are made richer by the proliferation of lightweight publishing tools like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, etc. ........ Investors have put tens of millions of dollars into wagers that these kinds of publishing tools will change the world. .... What will the world look like in 10 or 20 years, when today's young people feel entitled to instant, global, reliable communication and self expression?

TechCrunch: Victim Of Its Own Success: Tumblr Redefines The Concept Of “Back Shortly” I don’t think even Twitter has ever been down for more than 12 hours........ 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.

Mashable: Tumblr To Come Back Shortly, After Almost 24 Hours I’ve checked on the status of my own Tumblr blog, and it appears to be intact, which is a relief considering I have nearly two years’ worth of posts on the site..... And for everyone who was wondering today whether or not 4chan was to blame for the outage, we have it from Founder moot himself: It wasn’t...... last month 4chan users declared war on the blogging service, claiming that Tumblr users poach their memes

The best commentary on the topic is by ReadWriteWeb, my favorite group blog.
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