The popular blogging/reblogging platform went down yesterday afternoon during some planned maintenance; the exact reasons for the outage are unknown, but Tumblr has mentioned database cluster issues.
Rumors aside, the downtime had nothing whatsoever to do with a 4chan-led DDoS attack.
The official company blog states a fact of life for any successful startup: Keeping up with at-scale traffic on a startup's budget and infrastructure is hard, hard work, "more work than our small team was prepared for," the blog reads.
In fact, traffic for all Tumblr-powered blogs is in excess of 500 million pageviews per month, according to Tumblr.
Tumblr hopes to focus on infrastructure now; to that end, the New York City-based startup has quadrupled the size of its engineering team in the past month.
We hope these are solid back-end engineers with lots of experience in scalability issues; the last thing Tumblr wants is to reproduce the epic downtime waves of other popular web services that shall remain nameless.