Betabeat » downtime

Facebook Promises New Version of Mobile App Will Actually Load This Time, We Swear

Nitasha Tiku — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:15:02 -0400

"We’ve rebuilt the app from the ground up, so now the app opens much faster and your news feed and notifications load right when you open Facebook," the company says. Damn, just when you were getting used to the blue screen of silence being your only downtime, like ever.

Tumblr Had One Huge Recent Outage, But Also Hundreds of Smaller Ones

Adrianne Jeffries — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:31:00 -0400

Oh the woes of New York's darling microblogging service: A report by Royal Pingdom on Friday says that Tumblr's 23 hour and 44-minute blackout earlier this month, due to a failure during database maintenance, was in addition to hundreds of mini-outages on their blogs across the network.

"The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with the service," says a post on the blog maintained by Pingdom, which monitors uptime and performance of websites and servers on the Internet.

Tumblr's uptime struggles mirror what Twitter went through when the microblogging service started to get popular in 2008. An old report of social network downtimes from Royal Pingdom showed Twitter was down for 37 hours in the first four months of 2008, about twice as much as the next troubled network on the list.

Twitter and Tumblr have a similar asymmetrical following system and users of both services are prone to repost content in a viral storm of retweets or reblogs. All that traffic is a lot to scale, especially since Tumblr now has billions of views across 11 billion blogs.

Tumblr just got a $30 million infusion of funding and it's ramping up its engineering staff, so the blogging network should start to be more stable soon. Just hope Justin Bieber doesn't join—Twitter has had to dedicate three percent of its servers to the boy wonder and his retweet-happy fans.

[via TechCrunch]

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Growing Pains: Tumblr’s Kittens Have Been Down All Night

Adrianne Jeffries — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 08:33:06 -0400

This thing is the new fail whale.

UPDATE: Tumblr has been down for well over 18 hours, and its fans are getting restless, angry, bitter and fearful. Check out scenes from the blackout: Tumblr is Down: A Tweet Retrospective.

The increasingly popular blogging service Tumblr, based in New York, has been unavailable since about 6 p.m. last night.

The outage is causing fits among hipsters but it also brought down the blogs of various media organizations, including The Observer, as well as the status pages where Twitter and Foursquare communicate with users about their downtime.

Tumblr has kept mum on the cause of this downtime. "We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience," the company said on Twitter.

Tumblr has had a lot of downtime lately — partly because of a war with the cesspool of Internet pranksters known as 4chan, in which users of each site tried to flood the other with traffic. But the latest troubles are puzzling since Tumblr raised monster amounts of money last month, reported to be in the $25 to 30 million range at a valuation of $135 million.

"What has Tumblr been doing with all that money? Buying kittens?" a Tumblr user recently asked in frustration at finding the site unavailable.

"We use the kittens to power the servers," replied Mark Coatney, media liaison at Tumblr, a former Newsweek editor who created the behind-the-scenes Newsweek blog that made Tumblr trendy with journalists.

Those kittens have a big job: Tumblr's pageviews have increased 1,500 percent in the past year. We shudder to think what may have happened to them this time.

Tumblr went down because of a scheduled maintenance that "went haywire," Tumblr Founder David Karp tells TechCrunch, forcing the engineers to take down a critical database cluster. Tumblr has been manually rebuilding the cluster all night and the service will be upas soon as possible, he said.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries