And the Tumbler Website Outage Just Keeps Getting Worse

We recently informed you of the outages faced by Tumblr and Facebook. While the Facebook outage only lasted 20 minutes, it appears that Tumblr is still down for the count, more than a day later, and Tumblr users are getting frustrated. The reason for their frustration is understandable. There’s really no information coming from Tumblr as to why the outage occurred or when the site will be back up. This experience is just one example of why you shouldn’t put all of your social media eggs in one basket and why you should definitely communicate with customers when a website outage occurs.

Twitter is Abuzz Yet Again

As the Tumblr website outage becomes longer and longer, users of the site are becoming increasingly frustrated. Twitter user Courtney Gillespie tweeted, “Tumblr isn't even sorry anymore... their website doesn't even get to the apology stage. This outage is getting worse. #tumblr.” Another Twitter member by the name of “Luke” stated, “My tumblr worked for 30 seconds and now it’s down again is this some sick joke what even.” There’s no doubt, Tumblr is frustrating its fans and giving little reason as to why.

What We Did Hear from Tumblr

Tumblr should know how important it is to communicate with fans using social media sites, but there hasn’t been a tweet from them. The only thing we got from Tumblr was a message that we arrived to on their homepage when we tried to access the site. The message read, “We’re sorry. Service is temporarily unavailable. Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue.” Of course, we here at Alertra noticed there is no real reason given for the website outage, nor is there an estimate of when the site will be back up and running. If you want to keep customers happy, this isn’t the way to do it.

Sometimes It’s Best to Avoid the Footsteps of the Internet Giants

Usually when a site is an Internet giant you want to follow in their footsteps and take some cues from their success. Unfortunately, this is not one of those times. If your site goes down, the last thing you want to do is handle it the way Tumblr is handling their current website outage.

While we are big proponents of utilizing social media pages to communicate with your customer base and Tumblr is a site we have mentioned more than once, this recent website outage makes us wonder if they understand how vital communications with their users is. A lack of communication can severely damage the reputation of a site in just a matter of hours. Perhaps someone at Tumblr needs to read our blog and follow our advice in regards to customer communication and keeping customers happy.

Whatever you do, if your site goes down, remember that hiding your head in the sand is not the answer. Communicate with your customers and make sure you utilize social media sites (more than one) and keep a strong customer following so you can communicate with them if and when a website outage occurs. A lack of communication will only lead to customer frustration, as you can see by the tweets being spread across the World Wide Web by frustrated Tumblr users.