Blogging site Tumblr has become popular with hip young adults because it easily allows them to share text, images, video and other multimedia in a format that blends the traditional blog and social media sites. However, it might have become too popular for its own good, as PC Magazine reports that the site was down for most of the day on Monday due to database problems partially caused by the site’s rapid growth.
In a post on the Tumblr blog on Tuesday, Tumblr founder David Karp said that the outage was caused by an issue during planned maintenance that “took down a critical database cluster.” Karp said that a team of engineers “worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online,” but the Tumblr team understood that a major shutdown of service was unacceptable.
“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,” Karp wrote.
Karp also hinted that the growth of Tumblr in recent months has made it difficult for the company to keep up with the demand on its infrastructure.
“Frankly, keeping up with growth has presented more work than our small team was prepared for — with traffic now climbing more than 500 million pageviews each month,” he wrote. “But we are determined and focused on bringing our infrastructure well ahead of capacity as quickly as possible. We’ve nearly quadrupled our engineering team this month alone, and continue to distribute and enhance our architecture to be more resilient to failures like today’s.”