Tumblr’s 2nd Outage Was Intentional, Meant To Fix Network Issues

Tumblr’s second network wide outage in two weeks occurred on Wednesday night, and, unlike the worm-based attack that hit last week, the network’s second outage was intentional.

According to the Tumblr team, it reset the network because certain Tumblr pages were “experiencing slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages.”

At first announcement, Tumblr didn’t reveal the issue but eventually said it had “taken the site down in order to resolve a network issue.”

Two weeks ago, a worm made its way through Tumblr-hosted publications and blogs. The worm caused spam to appear on popular pages including properties owned by The Verge and CNET. The Tumblr worm also led to popup messages that virally circulated around Tumblr.

Tumblr did manage to protect user accounts during the hack, allowing its base to continue without further inconveniences.

The quickly growing social blog network has not said whether or not last week’s spam led to this weeks network problems.

Network issues are not uncommon among social networks, specifically networks that grow at accelerated rates because of unique features and word of mouth. Twitter experienced network issues for years and eventually launched its own network of servers to handle its ever increasing server load times.

As Tumblr continues to expand at a massive rate, users can probably expect more attacks against their accounts and the network as a whole. While Tumblr worms, spam, and other issues arise, they only show to highlight the company’s massive growth and hopeful potential.

Have the Tumblr outages in the last two weeks messed with your day?