This is getting really old really fast. And, to be perfectly honest, I would rather be writing about something other than the latest large website that had some kind of hiccup —outage, data breach, hack attack, meltdown, etc. Coming off the Twitter hack a few days ago, and what can now be grouped as “the troubles” that turned Microsoft (News - Alert), Amazon and Google into noncoms for various lengths of time), the Problems of Yahoo’s popular Tumblr today seem almost mundane.
In case you missed it, I would advise you to read a detailed and actually rather entertaining account in TechCrunch. It is packed with juicy insights and pictures from Twitter (News - Alert) into how what first appeared to be a hack that was sending content -- in some cases adult material (aka porn) -- from the Tumblr NSFW posting area was a technical issue which the company explained as:
“Earlier this morning, an infrastructure failure lasting roughly fifteen minutes led posts created in this window to become corrupt. No data was lost, but this has been causing inconsistent behavior for these affected blogs. Our engineering team is working quickly to correct the situation.”
I won’t spoil all of the fun, especially some of the more interesting graphics in the TechCrunch item, except to use this as just another opportunity to point out how poorly online companies handle these situations.
There are not lots of postings showing off the time-stamped Twitter feed from @Tumblr. It was posted at 10:34AM. I thought it would be interesting to show what the company’s Twitter page looked like at 6:00PM.