Tumblr is currently experiencing an outage that appears to be affecting all users. While the microblogging platform isn’t the most reliable service and often has issues with its Dashboard, specific blogs, and so on, this appears to be affecting all pages.
Tumblr has recovered from its earlier issues which affected the service for 6 hours. See the updates below for more.
We first started seeing Tumblr unable to load pages at 4:06PM EST. 20 minutes later, the company confirmed the problem on Twitter:
We’re experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages and are working quickly to restore performance.
— Tumblr (@tumblr) December 12, 2012
We have seen Tumblr pages completely not loading, displaying the typical error message when Tumblr is slow, and most recently this page:
This is an error we have seen before, sans the usual blue background. Here’s the text:
We’re sorry.
Service is temporarily unavailable. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.
Find out why you may have encountered this error.
Unfortunately, the “Find out why” link doesn’t work because, well, Tumblr is having problems. Furthermore, the status blog is also down (it’s probably not a good idea to host your status blog on your own domain).
Ah, there’s the blue background. Before we saw Tumblr’s tweet, we checked a few other sites that track outages and site problems.
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe informed us that “It’s not just you! http://tumblr.com looks down from here.” DownRightNow meanwhile shows Tumblr is experiencing a “Likely Service Disruption.”
We have contacted Tumblr about this issue. We will update this article with more details as we are given them.
Update at 4:30PM EST: Tumblr has given us the same details as it already sent out on Twitter. “We’re experiencing slow or intermittent errors on certain pages and are working quickly to restore performance,” a Tumblr spokesperson said in a statement.”
Update at 5:10PM EST: Now the site appears to be completely dead.
Update at 6:15PM EST: Tumblr has taken its site down to fix the problem.
Tumblr has taken the site down in order to resolve a network issue. We will update as we know more.
— Tumblr (@tumblr) December 12, 2012
Update at 8:30PM EST: Tumblr is starting to come back.
Recovery has been slowed by affected caching servers. Blogs are now coming back online as these caches warm up.
— Tumblr (@tumblr) December 13, 2012
Update at 9:50PM EST: Tumblr is back and working fine. Total outage time was almost six hours.
Image credit: David Emmert / Getty Images
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