I'm relatively new to Tumblr and though I was skeptical (as if I need another website to maintain), the format is easy, fast, and a great way to reach a vastly different audience. After urging from Jamie Vernon, Joe Hanson, and others, my new Science of Kissing site has been up two and a half months. With ~1,600 followers already, it seems very easy to build readership and I like the format - kind of traditional blog meets Twitter. Plus Tumblr promotes a friendly environment with lots of sharing and reblogging between users. I'm now fully converted--a born-again Tumblr you might say. If you haven't already heard, Tumblr tumbled last night. The site went down. At about 7pm, their twitter feed posted: "We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience." Fourteen hours later: "This has been a slow and painful recovery, but we're almost through. We'll have more info to share as soon as we can post to our blog again." Yet those who try to log on continue to see:
Theories abound as to what's going on from simple routine maintenance gone awry to hackers from competitive sites intentionally overloading the server. Some say we're minutes away from recovery while others claim Tumblr is over. The End. Well, I certainly hope not. What do you think is really going on?
