Tumblr just dropped out of DNS

https://www.tumblr.com/

by state_machine • 14 years ago

133 59 14 years ago

Pr0• 14 years ago

Seems it started with just a normal outage: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/12/tumblr-confirms-use...

emeraldd3• 14 years ago

  dig +trace www.tumblr.com

  *snip*

  tumblr.com.             300     IN      SOA     pdns1.ultradns.net. hostmaster.tumblr.com. 2012121602 86400 7200 604800 300
  ;; Received 108 bytes from 204.74.108.1#53(204.74.108.1) in 21 ms

Looks like their dns is down alright. You could try in your hosts file:

  72.32.231.8 www.tumblr.com tumblr.com

The ip is from their whois info and appears to be giving the We're sorry error message.

rtkwe2• 14 years ago

Huh the only way you can tell 72.32.231.8 redirects to tumblr's crash page is the link under find out why. Completely unbranded.

kondro2• 14 years ago

Could someone refresh my memory on how Tumblr makes its revenue?

sjtgraham• 14 years ago

If you really want to know why don't you find out and then come back to tell us instead of making fatuous comments

kondro2• 14 years ago

Love to, but Tumblr's site is down… so I can't check.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

Sponsored posts, premium themes, promoted posts. Pretty sure they're far from profitable, but they're bringing some revenue in.

http://www.quora.com/Tumblr/How-does-Tumblr-make-money

http://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-revenues-2012-9

cft• 14 years ago

If they are not profitable, it means that the downtime is actually improving their financials...;)

jonathanmoore• 14 years ago

- Brand spotlights

- Sponsored radar posts (ads)

- Promoted posts (for all users)

- Premium theme shared revenue

- Selling access to data

tmx2• 14 years ago

That's pretty bad.

Admittedly, they update their zone very frequently (every time a user signs up/changes name/deletes themselves), but you'd think they would have an independent secondary DNS provider somewhere.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Do they really? It seems more likely that they'd simply use a wildcard.

tmx2• 14 years ago

That'll teach me to post late at night. I forgot wildcards existed.

I was thinking that (if I built tumblr) they would do subdomain searching at the DNS level to avoid hitting their database.

Makes it even worse if they are using wildcards.

rdl4• 14 years ago

I believe they use ultradns (a nice, but very expensive, dns service).

kordless• 14 years ago

CloudFlare. Seriously guys.

el_cuadrado• 14 years ago

Looks like they have MX and TXT, but missing A. Weird.

onetwothreefour• 14 years ago

Looks like UltraDNS disabled their zones. Someone probably forgot to pay invoices or something.

You're pretty much screwed in this case.

emeraldd3• 14 years ago

What are you basing the "disabled zone" statement on? A 'dig ANY tumblr.com' shows MX, TXT, and NS records . . .

sbierwagen2• 14 years ago

  @tumblr
    Tumblr has taken the site down in order to resolve a 
    network issue. We will update as we know more.

https://twitter.com/tumblr/status/279000741706878976

emeraldd3• 14 years ago

Wow! Killing DNS is a nasty way to take down the site. That could take hours to come back.

takeda64• 14 years ago

Not really. Looks like their domain is configured so negative responses are cached only for 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Silhouette• 14 years ago

Given that they've been having can't-see-blogs-at-all scale problems for something like 24 hours already (I was looking for one last night, and it's currently nearly midnight UK time) I suspect a few more hours to clear up whatever fundamental screw-up is behind this could be a good investment.

adrr• 14 years ago

Recovery is going to spread over a few hours which could be a benefit.

sbierwagen2• 14 years ago

Tumblr is back up, after 4 hours of downtime.

Official apology post: http://staff.tumblr.com/post/37811176241/a-message-from-the-...

rdl4• 14 years ago

They get hundreds of extra points for hosting their status page on their own service.

That's basically the main (already widely accepted) lesson people should take from this -- people want twitter updates as well as an outside-hosted blog and monitor for service availability.

Achshar• 14 years ago

Doesn't serving status page form the site itself defeat the purpose of status page? In what case would that make any sense? I am now intrigued, this is not a small thing that can get over looked.

rdl4• 14 years ago

Yes, exactly.

For status other than "site is down", it's probably nice to have information on-site since I guess tumblr is about sharing easily within tumblr. But maintenance and server status needs to be both on-site (tumblr.com/status ?) and an off-site page at status.tumblr.com.

oh_sigh• 14 years ago

No, it does not defeat the purpose. Instead, it just lessens the effectiveness of the status page. It really depends on what tumblrs most common error scenario is. 95% of errors may manifest themselves in manners which do not affect the status of the status page.

moe• 14 years ago

The whole notion of "hosting" a status page is ridiculous.

You just generate it as static HTML and dump it on a bunch of free webhosters (or clouds if you want to be fancy). It's not rocket science to keep a HTML page online.

brokentone2• 14 years ago

Remember when we all decided Tumblr wasn't stable to host a professional site? Well... these people didn't.

http://theatlantic.tumblr.com/ http://fox411.blogs.foxnews.com/ http://motherjones.tumblr.com/ http://gq.tumblr.com/ http://tumblr.elle.com/

blake8086• 14 years ago

If the cost of hosting elsewhere exceeds the cost of the downtime, they made the right choice.

brokentone2• 14 years ago

Used to work at Fox, helped write the theme

Lot lot lot more costs involved, including an inane templating system that took way longer to work with than to build normally. Hosting would have happened on the existing platform adding little to no cost. Also, the cost (lost revenue, people running around pointing fingers) of downtime for a site that large (yes, even the entertainment blog) quickly DWARFS any possible hosting costs.

edit:formatting

OverlordXenu• 14 years ago

Aren't those essentially just advertising for the main sites?

state_machine• 14 years ago

Incidentally, this means every startup (and some of the bigger kids) that hosts its status page on Tumblr is missing a status page at the moment... eg: http://status.twitter.com

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

The Minecraft launcher also relies on tumblr to serve the landing page, a couple of million players will be seeing this: http://i.imgur.com/Zft71.png

Foomandoonian• 14 years ago

We've seen that before. It's better than the skin servers being down. Which they probably are.

munificent• 14 years ago

There's something beautiful about:

    * Tumbler reports its outage status using twitter.
    * Twitter reports its outage status using tumbler.

TallboyOne• 14 years ago

Beautiful

bbuffone• 14 years ago

Visit this page to see the length of downtime -> http://www.websitetest.com/ui/tests/50c922b17a6c8757bb000005.

The test will run every 10 minutes for the next 10 hours. Testing is only good for diagnosing issues like downtime and performance issues.

vhost-• 14 years ago

Speculation: Gmail, Facebook, then Tumblr? Kill switch?

Half kidding...

beagle3• 14 years ago

I was having the same thought.

But until proven otherwise, I'll assume strange coincidence. Although, when microsoft.com falls of the face of the earth tomorrow, I'm calling it a conspiracy.

cllns• 14 years ago

The main site/webapp is still down (3 hours later) but individual sites are up. http://theparisreview.tumblr.com/

They're returning 66.6.36.7 for DNS.

Tumblr just dropped out of DNS

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