Tumblr Blog Site down for 14 hours and counting

Tumblr, the New York City-based blog site that has caught on with the college undergrad set, is down, and according a number of sources, has been for 13 hours now, and counting, as of this writing at 9:22 AM EST.

On Twitter, Tumblr staff reported the problem via this tweet:

tumblr Tumblr
We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.
13 hours ago

What specifically happened, other than that "major issue in one of its database clusters” is not exactly known, but TechCrunch Robin Wauters' calls the entire issue as being due to Tumblr's own success. Erick Shonfeld, also in TechCrunch, reported that Tumblr increased in online traffic size by 1.4 billion page views in October alone, or a 1.540 percent growth rate in one month.

Blog outages are, in this era of the semi-professional and professional blogger, not fun to deal with.  But that stated, Tumblr's not commonly used for commercial blogging efforts.  

From what I understand from talking to those who use it (I use Blogger and Wordpress), the attraction is in what is best called "interblog interaction."  In other words, Tumblr's more like a social network than a standard blog site.

Tumblr is named after what is called the Tumblelog, or as Jason Kottke wrote in 2005, "a quick and dirty stream of thoughts."  He points to a blog called Anarhaia.org as being the first Tumblelog.    Note, it's not "Tumbleblog" but "Tumblelog," but whatever the case, Tumblr's not logging for anyone at this point. Stay tuned.