If you use Tumblr to host a blog with a custom domain name, you might notice that it’s not functioning properly. That’s apparently the case for companies like Airtime, Pinterest and Path, as I’ve come to find. Basically, blogs that are blog.whatever.com.
I reached out to Tumblr and received the following response:
There’s a networking issue affecting a subset of custom domain blogs- there will be a post up on staff shortly but the issue has been mostly resolved and performance is being restored.
While I’m not sure what “networking issue” means exactly or how small the “subset” of affected blogs is, this is surely a problem. I first noticed the issue about an hour ago and I’m seeing something like this when trying to visit the kind folks at Path:
Well, that’s not good, is it? The sad part is that you don’t get to see any fun 404 errors or fail-animals. We’ll update you when we learn more from Tumblr. Luckily, their blog isn’t down.
UPDATE: Looks like some blogs are popping back up, but no official word on what happened from Tumblr.
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UPDATE 2: David Karp has posted this on the Tumblr Staff blog:
During planned network maintenance this evening, an error by our team cut off traffic to a large subset of your custom domain blogs. Painfully, the full recovery took 1¾ hours to complete.
This is obviously unacceptable and an enormous disappointment to everyone working to keep your blogs fast and stable.
Ironically — or absurdly — this maintenance was part of ongoing infrastructure overhauls that have already done a tremendous amount to rid Tumblr of the awful tumblebeasts. We’re heartbroken this backfired today.
We’ll be conducting a comprehensive review of our procedures, redundancy, and recovery — taking all measures to prevent an incident like this from happening again.
We’re truly truly sorry.
The old “planned maintenance”, is it? Ah well, it’s nice to see that everything is back up and running.
[Photo source: Flickr]
