Tumblr will be down for a few hours this Saturday for ‘last major step’ in infrastructure upgrade

Tumblr today announced that all blogs as well as the Tumblr Dashboard will be unavailable for a “few hours” on Saturday October 6, starting at 4:00AM EST (1:00AM PST). The company explained this was a required move as the microblogging platform, which serves billions of impressions for its 150 million users, attempts to further improve performance.

Blake Matheny, VP Engineering at Tumblr, called the notice “bittersweet news” before giving up the details of what exactly will happen next weekend:

We are now ready to complete the last major step in upgrading our infrastructure. Unfortunately, it has one very uncomfortable side-effect: all traffic to blogs and the Dashboard will be suspended during the operation — returning a simple “we’ll be right back” message.

We are preparing for any issues that may arise and want you to expect your blogs to be unavailable starting at 4:00am EST this Saturday (Oct 6th), and to come back online slowly over the next few hours.

I promise, the maintenance behind this interruption will go an extremely long way towards ensuring the highest level of service for many years to come.

He also apologized for the “inconvenience” of taking down users blogs. The error message that all users will see next weekend will also say Tumblr is sorry:

You can read the whole announcement for yourself over here: Maintenance Notice. I realized the announcement page does not include a year, meaning this could have already happened. I thus contacted Tumblr to confirm the news. “Yes, next Saturday the 6th,” a Tumblr spokesperson told The Next Web in a statement.

See also: Some users were unable to reach Tumblr today, the team details what happened

Image credit: Lesli Lundgren