Betabeat » The Tumblr Trainwreck

Users Prefer Tumblr’s Tumbeast to Twitter’s Fail Whale In a Landslide

Adrianne Jeffries — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:37:25 -0400

Tumblr's new 404 mascot, the Tumbeast, is beating Twitter's fail whale by a landslide in a popularity contest at This or That.

Users prefered the drooly Tumbeasts, created by Matt Inman of webcomic The Oatmeal, over the fail whale, 84 percent to 16 percent. (The fail whale still has four times as many followers on Twitter, though.)

"It's a #TumbeastTakeover!" the new mascot tweeted yesterday.

Congratulations to the Tumbeast, but the honeymoon won't last long. Expect the Tumbeast's favorables to drop significantly after users start to associate it with Tumblr's frustratingly frequent outages.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Tumblr Adds Suggested Tumbeast to 404 Page

Adrianne Jeffries — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:17:18 -0400

Tumblr has a new mascot—the Tumbeast.

Tumblr has been drowning in its own popularity lately, reminded users of Twitter's frequent outages in the early days.

But Twitter has a lovable downtime mascot, the "fail whale' drawn by artist Yiying Lu, which has had an article in The New York Times Magazine and has its own fan club. Tumblr's error message, by contrast, is a flip-style marquee with the infuriating message "We'll be back shortly."

Matthew Inman of webcomic The Oatmeal pointed this out recently in a Tumblr post that got more than 3,000 comments, reblogs and likes.

"If you're going to go down, you might as well blame it on an imaginary animal like Twitter did with their infamous Fail Whale. I've taken the liberty of creating this animal for you," he wrote.

Inman came up with the TumblBeasts, bug-eyed, furry, green creatures that eat servers. Tumblr has decided to use the artwork on its 404 page, Inman tweeted yesterday. Tumblr changed the name from TumblBeast to Tumbeast.

The new error message reads, "We may have forgotten to feed the wild Tumbeasts that roam our datacenter, which often results in unexpected downtime due to gnawing and/or mutiny. Animal control has been alerted." You can see the error page and Tumbeasts here. The new mascot already has a Twitter page.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

101 Reasons Tumblr Could Be Down

Adrianne Jeffries — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:38:50 -0400

Service over at the local blogmonger Tumblr has been sputtering over the past month or so.

But the site's error page, an old-fashioned flip board that says "We'll be back shortly," is nowhere near as cute as Twitter's fail whale.

Adam Hemphill, a San Francisco developer who works for Wired, createdwellbebackshortly.com so people could have something to look at during Tumblr's not-infrequent outages.

Something about a database cluster that crashed during maintenance was Tumblr's official explanation for plunging its users into an epic 24 hours of darkness in December.

But if you're wondering why you can't reach your favorite Tumblrs, here are some possible explanations:

Squirrels
WikiLeaks was hosted here
The hipsters decided it'd be ironic to leave and go back to Blogspot
We finally noticed we forgot the friggin' 'e'
Our cat died
Gone for lunch, be back in 10
The rent is too damn high
Stuck in traffic... There in 15ish?
Sorry, someone picked up the phone in another room
But let us be clear:
We're never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Some obscure reason... You've probably never heard of it
Had a thing
Looking up the definition of "shortly."
The reason is something topical that won't make sense next week
David Karp is on a REALLY good date
Eduardo froze the accounts

You can suggest reasons why Tumblr is down by tweeting with the hashtag #reasonstumblrwentdown.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Internet Forgives Tumblr for 24 Hours of Downtime

Adrianne Jeffries — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 09:20:13 -0400

Tumblr is BACK, baby.

Twenty-four year old Tumblr founder and notorious good quote David Karp posted a heartfelt apology on the Tumblr staff blog, finally visible this morning after the entire site was down for more than 24 hours.

Yesterday's outage prompted annoyance that turned into disbelief and then outrage, as Tumblr's nine million users yearned for cat pictures, magical rappers and photos of Kim Jong Il looking at things.

Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider posited at one point that Tumblr was stalling because it had "lost EVERYTHING," a claim which Tumblr President John Maloney shot down as "ridiculous."

Karp writes in a post called "Downtime":

While you might feel like you've gotten used to seeing errors on Tumblr recently, know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression.

Tumblr caught flak yesterday for crashing after what seemed like a week of intermittent downtime reminiscent of Twitter's frequent fail whale days. The blackouts seemed especially unfair to users considering that Tumblr had just raised a boatload of money.

But that deal hasn't been finalized yet, and the site has gotten to 500 million pageviews a month, Karp said, too much for Tumblr's small team. He added that Tumblr has "nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone."

It seems unreasonable to expect so much from a free service, but Web users are tough customers (see Marshall Kirkpatrick's take over at ReadWriteWeb, "Why a Day of Tumblr Down Time Matters to the Entire Web & World"). Fortunately for Tumblr, even 24 hours wasn't enough to make users abandon the service.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries