The great Tumblr blackout: 3 theories

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."

"Tumblr down, some speculate due to DDoS"

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Tumblr's tech team is inept: This is "not good news," says Adam Mills at The Next Web, especially when you consider Tumblr is one of "the top 50 biggest websites in the United States." A site with that sort of prestige should be able to fix a blackout in under half a day. "Three words come to mind after all of this: Get it together."

"Tumblr goes down"

The site has grown too quickly: "Technical difficulties are part of the game," says Robin Wauters at TechCrunch, "but I don't think even Twitter has ever been down for more than 12 hours." The rapidly expanding Tumblr recently raised a "ton of money" in preparation to "staff its brand new New York offices" — something they "desperately" need to get done if this unprecedented blackout is anything to go by.

"Victim of its own success: Tumblr redefines the concept of 'back shortly'"