Tumblr, the popular "microblogging" service beloved by the technorati, has suffered a major service outage. No Tumblr site has been online since Sunday evening, an unusually lengthy outage for a major website, causing many of its fans to swamp Twitter and Facebook with despairing comments. The blogging service — which allows users to easily post and share photos, pictures, and links — works more like a social network than a traditional blog set-up. Tumblr's staff blamed the problem on a "major issue in one of its database clusters." What's going on?
Tumblr has been hacked: Some suspect this may be the work of hackers, says George Spangler at World News Headlines. "There were indications that several users of a forum site were engineering this attack," planning to overload Tumblr's network with "traffic it cannot use," a hack known as a DDoS, or "distributed denial of service." Some users of Tumblr were even "planning to preempt [the effort] with their own attack."
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