It's not just you, Tumblr went down today
UPDATED 7:10 p.m. ET with information from a group claiming responsibility for the hack.
Tumblr went down for over two hours this afternoon as a result of a large-scale DDoS attack. A group claiming to be behind the attack contacted Mashable with one clear message: This was for the lulz.
But what was funny to the hackers was frustrating for Tumblr users, who took to Twitter to complain in droves about the outage.
What happened
Online status tools first reported the site was down a little after 3:15 p.m. ET. The service said on Twitter that some users were experiencing "latency."
The site came back online for a few minutes at around 3:52 p.m. ET, before going back offline. At around 4:22 p.m. ET, a Tumblr spokesperson told Mashable the company was working on the issue, but offered no further details.
At around 5:45 p.m. ET, service was restored to the site. That said, Tumblr's Twitter page didn't give the all clear until 6:22 p.m.
Claiming responsibility
While Tumblr was still down, Mashable was contacted on Twitter by R.I.U. Star Patrol, a group claiming responsibility for the attacks.
The account started tweeting about the attack just before the outage hit, and retweeted responses to the service stoppage as the situation played out. The timestamps correspond roughly to the time between when Tumblr went down initially and when service was fully restored.
Via DM, the group told Mashable the DDoS attack wasn't meant to harm anyone.
"There is no sinister motive," they replied when asked for the cause of the attacks."It's all for light hearted fun."
The group also accurately predicted via message when Tumblr would go back online.
Mashable is reaching out to online security experts to verify the likelihood that this group was indeed behind the DDoS assault.
The freak out
The site's users were not pleased by the outage and took to Twitter to respond in the only way they know how: GIFs.
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Some users even speculated that the outage might be connected with the season finale of Yuri on Ice, a popular anime series with a huge Tumblr community. But it appears as if Yuri on Ice wasn't Tumblr's problem.
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Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
