Tumblr Had One Huge Recent Outage, But Also Hundreds of Smaller Ones

Adrianne Jeffries — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:31:58 -0400

Oh the woes of New York's darling microblogging service: A report by Royal Pingdom on Friday says that Tumblr's 23 hour and 44-minute blackout earlier this month, due to a failure during database maintenance, was in addition to hundreds of mini-outages on their blogs across the network.

"The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with the service," says a post on the blog maintained by Pingdom, which monitors uptime and performance of websites and servers on the Internet.

Tumblr's uptime struggles mirror what Twitter went through when the microblogging service started to get popular in 2008. An old report of social network downtimes from Royal Pingdom showed Twitter was down for 37 hours in the first four months of 2008, about twice as much as the next troubled network on the list.

Twitter and Tumblr have a similar asymmetrical following system and users of both services are prone to repost content in a viral storm of retweets or reblogs. All that traffic is a lot to scale, especially since Tumblr now has billions of views across 11 billion blogs.

Tumblr just got a $30 million infusion of funding and it's ramping up its engineering staff, so the blogging network should start to be more stable soon. Just hope Justin Bieber doesn't join--Twitter has had to dedicate three percent of its servers to the boy wonder and his retweet-happy fans.

[via TechCrunch]

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Observer » Tumblr Had One Huge Recent Outage, But Also Hundreds of Smaller Ones

Tumblr Had One Huge Recent Outage, But Also Hundreds of Smaller Ones