Just my opinion, and I certainly don't speak for everyone, but as an engineer, it's frustrating to see a talented group of devs and boatloads of funding behind a great site, yet almost zero transparency about downtime. When was the last time they used the staff blog or Twitter account to do anything besides promote popular users? I'm fine with unscheduled downtime — it happens — but when there are few/no announcements, and barely any post-mortems, that's when (at least for me) it gets very frustrating.
http://twitter.com/tumblr/status/11570891053862912 … 130 characters, 21 words, no actual information other than that which could be assumed: we’re working on it (can be assumed), we’re sorry (should be hoped).
https://github.com/blog/744-today-s-outage … ~2,000 characters, 335 words, and an absolute plethora of transparency and information. In fact, more than we probably needed to know, even the techies among us… but nonetheless, quite reassuring and friendly on GitHub’s part.
I’m sorry, Tumblr. You’re failing. Not technically; nobody cares about a little downtime, you’re not Google, you don’t make aircraft stay in the air, you don’t track weather patterns that could tear apart an entire coast, the world’s not going to end. No. What you’re failing at is being that which it is absolutely most imperative for you to be, being which itself being the single impetus for your existence: a friendly, transparent, communicative tech entity that your users can trust.
I don't think it's fair to compare those two. One is a while it's still happening tweet, the other is a post mortem from after the incident.
Tumblr's engineers are likely very busy right now working on getting things back up and running. You can't expect them to take time out from that to write a detailed incident report for the public. Wait and see what they release tomorrow before making a judgement.
Simply put, what mcdavis said. GitHub also has a history of being communicative during issues; not to mention near-instantaneous fixes of problems (anybody remember how unbelievably quickly they re-architected their entire site to deal with the scaling and speed problems that had barely started to surface? how about the lack of speed issues since?) as opposed to these things I’m hearing of people seeing the same, obvious, bugs over the last two years or so.
tumblr is awesome, worth it to use even with horrible downtime, but it's getting really weird how they never talk about anything relating to ops/roadmap/product (good or bad)
Long version:
I'm hesitant to dis tumblr to an audience i'm not sure has tried tumblr. i'm always scared i'll send the wrong message.
Tumblr is mostly amazing, extremely valuable, and actually trying to do something interesting + valuable for its users. (From the outside it's hard to see. But as with Twitter, the inside view of using it reveals all sorts of interactions and relationships that make it awesome + addictive.)
Main point? You should use tumblr. It's not just a blog platform. It's a place to discover awesome content, connect with interesting folks, and get your stuff heard really easily.
But... those of us who have used tumblr for a while have different conversations amongst ourselves.
Aside from performance, Tumblr has been buggy for an extremely long time. Since before its recent spike in popularity and sharp growth.
In fact, I almost get bummed when the topic of performance issues come up because i fear that attention to broken things like Dashboard search, saved tags, group blogs, etc... will get overlooked.
Their API is also a bit stagnant, which even if you're not a dev, means less cool stuff you can do w/all the amazing content + people in Tumblr.
As kylebragger wrote above, it's surreal how Tumblr does not mention a thing. They don't have a status blog. They don't have a user forum where we can talk about Tumblr best practices. (There is an abandoned Get Satisfaction presence). They don't have a place to suggest features for users, or developers. No Uservoice. No mailing list. They have a blog which is about 80% recommending fun Tumblrs to follow. They also announce apps. They have a couple of times addressed bugginess around a feature, queues, but only after they felt they fixed it.
This makes me think they are probably working on some giant code bomb that will fix everything, and don't want talk about stuff until they have good news. I understand that, but don't agree with it. It's literally been years. It's just more acute now than it's been before.
Anyway, I don't hate Tumblr, I LOVE tumblr. I recommend it to tons of people. Even if it's down 2 hours every day, i'll still recommend it.
But it is not cool how they never talk about stuff. I get that transparency is not the only style of community and product management. (Something something Steve Jobs Apple.)
But I think it's a bad fit here. Also, even Apple writes (in their own control freaky way) about big issues that everybody is talking about (AppStore scandals, antennagate, etc.)
"This makes me think they are probably working on some giant code bomb that will fix everything, and don't want talk about stuff until they have good news. I understand that, but don't agree with it."
Or, more likely IMO, they could be struggling to keep up with their growth and letting all the fixes and improvements slide.
Normally this would be a reasonable assumption. And it is possible.
But given that many of these issues have been going on for at least 2 years (since i've been an active user), before their recent spike, i don't think so.
Also, i feel they 'code bombed' the queue issue they had earlier. It was really broken, and they were basically silent until they thought they had a fix. The vibe I get is that they basically only like to give good news. I sympathize with that. (But explain above why i think that's bad.)
(PS: for people who don't read my big post above, please know i love + recommend tumblr even with their issues. please try it when it's back up if you haven't already.)
In fairness, Github's complete transparency is likely to be understood by Githubbers. A technical explanation from Tumblr is far more likely to be met with "so what, where are my cat macros?" than Github's explanations are.
