Tumblr blocked in Saudi Arabia

Tumblr can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to Internet censorship. We already know that Tumblr has been incorrectly flagged for pornographic content by Canadian security software Netsweep, and as a consequence, was blocked for some time in Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Yemen.

It would seem that Saudi Arabia is the latest country to deem Tumblr blogs inappropriate for public consumption. Reports are emerging on Twitter, and ironically on Tumblr as well, that Saudi residents can no longer access the blogging platform.

Some reports state that everything is accessible except the actual dashboard, meaning you can browse Tumblr blogs anyway, but can’t produce content, while more recent reports on Twitter state that you can’t access the Tumblr dashboard or blogs, but can still access profiles.

This is not the first hit that Tumblr has taken in Saudi Arabia. A few months earlier, the search function on Tumblr was disabled, while other sites such as Amnesty International, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all been blocked at one time or another, with the royal kingdom’s attempt to regulate Internet use throughout the country.

Whether or not this is a temporary block or not is something that remains to be seen.

Source: The Next Web

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“Squirrels” And 100 Other Reasons Why Tumblr Is Down

With Tumblr recently experiencing a 24-hour offline stint and a reported single 9 of service reliability, there are plenty of jokes about the microblogging service’s infamous downtime (most I’ve heard have at least a tenuous WikiLeaks connection).

Here’s the most Tumblr elaborate satire piece yet: Go to http://wellbebackshortly.com/and hit refresh. Hit refresh again, and again.

Created by Adam Hemphill, the site is a riff on the Tumblr “We’ll Be Back Shortly” page and generates over a hundred hypothetical excuses as to why Tumblr is down so Tumblr doesn’t have to. (Tumblr is currently UP, at the moment.)

Some of the best:

“Does anyone know how to fix a “database cluster”? #lazyweb”

“Cocaine is a hell of a drug”

“Squirrels”

“We’re a free service. Goddamn.”

“Did we mention we re-hired Jakob Lodwick this weekend?”

“The rent is too damn high”

“I am away from my computer right now.”

“Eduardo froze the accounts”

Oh hell, every single one of these is good. See for yourself.

Source: Tech Crunch

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Bloggers Most Reliable Blogging Platform As Tumblr Tumbles On

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has tested five major blogging services for their reliability. Unsurprisingly given its recent woes, micro-blogging startup Tumblr received a disastrous score, while Google’s Blogger came up on top with not a second of downtime.

Pingdom’s tests were performed once a minute over a period of two months, from October 15 to December 15, from multiple locations in both North America and Europe. Included in the tests were Blogger, WordPress.com, Typepad, Tumblr and Posterous. Not only the uptime of the blogging platform’s homepage was monitored, but also four individual blogs.

Pingdom found that Blogger didn’t seem to display any downtime whatsoever in the two months of testing, while WordPress.com also showed an ability to remain available most of the time. Typepad came up third, but not with a lot of difference from the two former blogging service.

When you look at the upstart, basic blogging services, the differences become more clear. Posterous showed mixed results in terms of reliability, but Tumblr clearly takes the downtime cake on that level.

According to Pingdom, some of the Tumblr blogs it monitored during the two-month window were unavailable for more than two days, beating the general downtime of the platform of 24+ hours Tumblr struggled with last week.

Clearly, the startup can use the recent capital injection to improve reliability quite a bit:

However, it should be noted that Tumblr’s problems haven’t just been a few big outages, but a large number of smaller ones. The Tumblr blogs we monitored had an average of more than 300 outages during these two months, some very brief, indicating an ongoing performance issue with  the service.

Source: Tech Crunch

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Tumblr Finally Starts Recovering After 24 Hours Of Downtime

Popular blogging service Tumblr is finally recovering from its seemingly endless downtime. The final tally: over 24 hours, based on the tweet Tumblr sent out around 4PM PST yesterday announcing that it was “working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters.” Tumblr followed that up over the ensuing day with some intermittent (and overly optimistic) status updates, and tweeted an hour ago that “All blogs are online and we’re incrementally restoring access to the Dashboard.”

Note that Tumbr isn’t fully functional yet, as only some users can add content to their sites now. But at least visitors aren’t getting an error message any more.

Obviously this was a horrible day for the startup, which is raising a big new round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. It’s usually a big deal when popular platforms go down for an hour or two — I can’t remember hearing about a site as popular as Tumblr going down for a full day. The site has a famously small headcount — hopefully the new funding will help it ensure this was a one-time issue.

Tumblr founder David Karp gave this statement about the downtime last night; we’ll update once the site posts an overview of what happened:

Some scheduled maintenance yesterday that wasn’t intended to interrupt service went haywire and wound up taking down a critical database cluster. Rebuilding the entire cluster has been a painfully slow and manual process, but we’re almost through. We’ll be posting a recap when we’re back up.

Source: Tech Crunch

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