Bloggers Rejoice As Tumblr Returns From Outage

Bloggers, social media experts, and amateur photographers rejoiced on Friday afternoon, after Tumblr returned from a six hour outage. The outage struck at 8:40 AM Eastern Time on Friday, and saw Twitter flooded with complaints from users around the world. Tumblr’s demographics skew younger than many of the other social sites on the internet, so the outcry was loud, and users were generally impatient.
An hour earlier, Tumblr’s owners had commented on Twitter, telling users that they were aware of slow loading and intermittent errors on the site. It wasn’t until 10:00AM that Tumblr acknowledged that they’d gone completely dark, however. At that point the owners said that:
“Tumblr is experiencing network problems following an issue with one of our uplink providers. We will return to full service shortly.” Naturally, users weren’t happy. The site hosts more than 78million blogs, and is the 36th most popular site in the world according to Alexa, so it’s understandable that it’s absence was noticed. The site returned at 2:15PM ET.
Tumblr isn’t the only social service that has had problems recently. Pinterest (the popular photo sharing site that attracts a mostly female membership), Reddit (much loved by gamers and geek culture enthusiasts), and several other social websites were brought down by an Amazon server outage earlier in October. These repeated, widespread outages have caused havoc for many online marketers, and have led some to question the value of cloud hosting services compared to the extra degree of control you have over your own services.
Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter are trundling along quietly, and working well. As much as webmasters love to complain about Twitter’s API changes and Facebook’s privacy policies, there’s something to be said for stable and reliable websites!