Note that Tumbr isn’t fully functional yet, as only some users can add content to their sites now. But at least visitors aren’t getting an error message any more.
Obviously this was a horrible day for the startup, which is raising a big new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It’s usually a big deal when popular platforms go down for an hour or two — I can’t remember hearing about a site as popular as Tumblr going down for a full day. The site has a famously small headcount — hopefully the new funding will help it ensure this was a one-time issue.
Tumblr founder David Karp gave this statement about the downtime last night; we’ll update once the site posts an overview of what happened:
Some scheduled maintenance yesterday that wasn’t intended to interrupt service went haywire and wound up taking down a critical database cluster. Rebuilding the entire cluster has been a painfully slow and manual process, but we’re almost through. We’ll be posting a recap when we’re back up.
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Authors: Jason Kincaid