After suffering massive downtime in December due to their immense growth, the engineers at Tumblr have posted explanation in order to help fend off critics regarding the platform’s stability.
As we break through our past bottlenecks, we are simultaneously faced with growth like we’ve never seen before. Our challenge is not only to support the current audience of 55 million, but to getahead of more than 250,000,000 new pageviews each week. […]
This morning we suffered an outage for nearly an hour starting at about 7am EST. The proxy server that handles the vast majority of incoming requests failed, and its automatic backup also failed because of an unrelated networking issue. It took us longer than hoped to correct the multiple causes, but we’ve put systems into place to make sure that even another double failure won’t cause an outage like this in the future. (Tumblr Staff Blog)
Note: Emphasis theirs.
Tumblr has faced some sharp criticism within the blogosphere, especially after one of the founders sent a cold reply to a tech blogger who was outraged regarding the services less than stellar uptime record.
While Tumblr’s growth has been nothing short of impressive, hopefully the company can find a way to stabilize their servers, as they are one of the few blogging platforms that seems to be gaining popularity amongst the youth.
