The thing that really freaked me out was that the layout on my Tumblr just changed randomly. I didn’t got in to change it or try any custom theme. For years I gave them the benefit of the doubt, when it was eating my posts or the site was going down. But this is something happening on the backend I can’t control. I’m not going to spend all this time tyring to babysit my Tumblr.

I’m not quitting, if the service got better tomorrow I would be back on. But right now I cant even get on to post my responses to people who are saying I quit.

Fear not, news junkies. In the meantime you can follow De Rosa on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

As Adrianne Jeffries reported for Betabeat several months ago, since the Tumblr team got serious about hiring engineers, downtime has been far better than in years past. But clearly stability is still an issue for the rapidly growing service.

Photo: MSPaint

"Finally!" local Tumblr mogul Anthony de Rosa reblogged when he saw the news. It's rather amazing that an embeddable "share this via Tumblr" button didn't exist already--we know users have been clamoring for it, and it's something the other major major social network start-up in this city added before it had half Tumblr's userbase--but now it's here, so shut up. "It’s now super easy to add a 'Share on Tumblr' button to any site," the company staff blog says. "The Tumblr Button can give you complete control over how your content appears when shared on Tumblr. Not only does this mean specifying an excerpt or summary, but also deciding whether it appears as a Link, Quote, Photo, or Video Embed.

"Even better: This can be deeply integrated with just about any publishing platform to add contextual buttons next to things like paragraphs or photos... The appearance of the button is also completely customizable."

When asked for comment, local Tumblr moguls said, "Weee."

Tumblr servers crashed around the time Betabeat discovered the new button and remain crashed as we type. "We're very sorry," the 404 page commented.

I've had better days.

Tumblr has been down for nearly 18 hours now.

As always happens when a major social site goes black, frustrated users have taken to other mediums to voice their discontent.

There is a predictable arc to the comments around these issues.

The first to notice the problem are often hesitant, not wanting to cry wolf when the issue might be with their own machines.

As soon as awareness reaches critical mass, or the service confirms the outage, all hell breaks loose. Avid users tend to respond with outrage, like junkies in need of a fix.

Quickly the tide turns and users are mocked for their dependence on a single service.

Cooler heads prevail, someone jokes about getting off the computer and "making real friends".

It's a bad scene for Tumblr right now, but things could always be worse. Like when AOL mail went down...and nobody noticed.

Check Out Ten Great Tweets From The Ongoing Tumblr Fail >

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries