In the movie The Social Network Jessie Eisenberg, starring as Facebook CEO/Founder Mark Zuckerberg discovers that his business partner Eduardo Saverin has taken all the money from their business account, Mark becomes angry when he realizes that server payments could be missed, resulting in site downtime, which leads Mark to explain to Eduardo that Facebook is the site that “Never” goes down and that their users expect that type of service. I bring that scene up because the Tumblr team must be kicking themselves after just coming back online from a 24 hour downtime hiatus caused by server issues.
While the exact cause of the issue which occurred during a scheduled maintenance period has not been released, Tumblr team members have mentioned “database cluster issues” as a culprit.
Tumblr does appear to be taking everything in stride, mentioning that downtime is an issue that startups have to deal with when working on a shoestring budget with a small team of tech minded individuals. According to their blog, the upgrade was “more work than our small team was prepared for.”
With more than 500 million pageviews per month across their network, the Tumblr team says they will now focus on infrastructure issues, quadrupling the size of their engineering team to help with issues of scale.
How did Tumblr’s downtime affect your last 24 hours?
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i had just deactivated a test blog i had there , i thought for a while i might have been the one who turned something off!!
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The outage really didn’t effect me too much. I do currently have a blog there, but its a test blog to try the service out again and see how to push my content and get readers attention. However I think I need a different service, its just not working out, but of course neither did Posterous.
As for the whole deal of Facebook and not going down vs. Tumblr that was down for 24 hours, its a free service, outages happen, I understand that, but now they need to explain to users what happened and deal with the issues.
Maybe Tumblr and Twitter should join and create one service, now that is the next level to social media and no more short URLs, 140 charactors…
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I blinked and I missed it. Sorry Tumblr.
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For those Tumblr users that were greatly effected and are thinking of leaving for another service, besides Posterous, what other options do they have and are there any new or different services?
I ask for myself and for others because I sure this 24 hours outage affected several people.
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Maybe Tumblr and Twitter should join and create one service, now that is the next level to social media and no more short URLs, 140 charactors…