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Mark Wyner’s frank but optimistic remarks on yesterday’s major Tumblr outage:
This was related to a colossal database-cluster failure with Tumblr, the publishing system I use to publish my posts. The rest of my site, outside the Tumblr network, was in good order. But it sucked all the same.
I forgive Tumblr, though. They’re in their infancy and are still building a network which is capable of handling the increasing volumes of traffic they receive. Hopefully they got the kinks worked out so I can continue to oblige my addiction.
My site, on the other hand, is fully dependent on Tumblr. I suppose I should be more cautious about being at the mercy of a free service. Then again, Twitter is a free service, and if it were down for 24+ hours, not just individuals but businesses, too, would be up in arms.
While we don’t pay services such as Tumblr and Twitter in monetary means, we do pay them in usage, not to mention attention given to any revenue-generating services (i.e. ads or sponsored items). This usage and attention is what attracts the huge sums of investment dollars these kinds of companies acquire. In the end, if our attention and usage cannot be “paid” to these free services, it’s likely we’ll pay them elsewhere.
I’ve been pretty forgiving of Tumblr’s downtime and will probably continue to forgive for a little while. But if it keeps up, I’ll have to spend my imaginary (or actual) pennies on another service.
