I know, my blog is turning into a Tumblr-a-thon. But I’ve done this before when I used to talk about Brightkite, Ma.gnolia, WordPress, Twitter and other services that I become attached to and care about. This is my blog and I can cry if I want to.
Here is how David Karp, founder of Tumblr, recently commented on Tumblr’s downtime to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfield.
"Karp admits that the company was “unprepared” for that kind of hockey-stick hypergrowth, but with a new $30 million round in the bank, he says his team is working round the clock to keep scaling and catching up with all the sudden demand. Karp says the growth is coming in part from college students, who really took to the service only since September, 2009 or so and, more recently, international growth in Europe, Japan,and Brazil. He also tells me separately that 65 percent of those pageviews come from Tumblr users looking at their Dashboards (which shows the stream of posts from other people on Tumblr they follow)."
Good.
Also I just found this post on Karp’s blog that has this interesting bit.
"Ah, yes – an incredible opportunity and challenge!
The really impressive piece is that our engineers have been keeping up with this surge in traffic while serving fewer and fewer errors every week. It’s been a rough couple of months, but we’re almost there."
"Opportunity and challenge" is the perfect way to put it. Karp gets it. Now if only Tumblr assigned someone on the staff to do updates and share stats on these "fewer errors every week" via the main Staff blog?Oh wait, they already did.
Tumblr did a 180. Congrats.