I don’t mean literally all the time, but when a vendor tells you flatly “we’ve designed problem X out of the system. It’s impossible. Never going to happen again.” Then that problem, or something indistinguisable to it happens, it sort of shakes your faith a bit.

Some systems and technologies are better than others, I won’t get into the details. However they all have the ability to fail and cause pain. Let the techs do their work; they are likely keenly aware of the consequences of systems failure.

The only time to question the very viability and existence of a site is when they fall down over and over again, their explanations don’t make any sense, and the problems of their outages start to hit you close to home.

I doubt that this is related to the 4Chan attack from a couple weeks ago. That seemed to just cause a minor blip in the traffic. Of course, you never know . . . It’s sad that in this day and age it only takes 16 hours of downtime for a web venture to be declared “catastrophic” and “disastrous”. The strength of Tumblr is the community, and everything will be fine. Where were you during the Great Tumblr Downtime of 2010?