Popular blogging service Tumblr was hit with a massive service outage on Friday morning, shutting down millions of popular blogs in the process. Disruption was reportedly first noticed around 8:30 a.m. according to Down Right Now which uses official announcements and first-hand reports from Twitter and others to determine service outages.
Tumblr has acknowledged the problem on Twitter. A post earlier this morning (which has since been removed) suggested the site was experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on some pages.
That update has since been replaced with a post from a few hours ago saying they were experiencing network problems following an issue with one of their uplink providers. Tumblr promised to return to full service shortly but as of writing, the site remains grounded.
In the event that you try to visit a Tumblr page in the meantime, you’ll likely be met with an error page saying the service is temporarily unavailable.
It’s the first major outage for the service in quite some time. As PC Mag points out, it used to be a common occurrence for the site to nose-dive under intense traffic. Founder David Karp said the service experienced growth that initially blew their expectations – a great problem to have – but one that was tough for a new engineering team to deal with.
Tumblr launched in 2007 and is now home to more than 77 million personal blogs. It’s the 36th most popular destination on the web according to Alexa and the 19th most visited in the US.
