Tumblr Takes One

Outage cripples microblogging site

Tumblr has fallen — and hasn't been able to get up!

The popular social microblogging platform utilized by many prominent media companies (like Newsweek and NPR) and people (like John Mayer) went down late Sunday night, and as of 8:30 a.m. ET remains that way.

Visitors to Tumblr sites were greeted with this message:

"We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience."

It’s the first major outage for the upstart service, which launched in 2007. (The company, founded by David Karp, raised more than $10 million in startup capital from New York-based Union Square Ventures and Boston-based Spark Capital, and recently secured another round of financing from Silicon Valley’s Sequoia.)

Later, Tumblr added via its Twitter feed: “This has been a slow and painful recovery, but we're almost through. We'll have more info to share as soon as we can post to our blog again."

UPDATE, 12:00 p.m. ET: Still down.

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