I have abandoned Zembla in favor of SeanKeaneComedy.com a while ago, and really, abandoned Sean Keane Comedy for an assortment of sports Tumblrs. So Sunday's epic Tumblr outage was quite distressing to my blogging life, especially since it was an NFL Sunday. Many close games, uncommented, coaches unmocked, athlete photos uncaptioned with hilarity. More maddening was Tumblr's actual response to the outage, one that reads as twee as the site itself, which is primarily driven by photos of cute cats and Zooey Deschanel.
"We're working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience."
That's the error message, and they also tweeted it. Of course, the official site status is updated on a Tumblr blog. (As is Twitter's! Hope they never go down at the same time!) But for some reason, the word "incredibly" is what infuriates me. "I'm incredibly sorry" really means, "Oh my gosh, you are so mad at me, aren't you?" Overly earnest, but also ineffectual. Which is basically what you'd expect from a company whose staff looks like this:
If this had happened to a tech company in California, people would be working feverishly to resolve the problem. They'd be going without sleep, chugging Red Bulls, and bugging their doctor friends to put them on Adderall IVs. But Tumblr is based in Brooklyn! I imagine the conversation Sunday afternoon went something like this.
"Guys, I know we still have a lot of database issues. But this yoga class is only once a week. My body is telling me i really need to go."
"That's cool, Meaghan. I have tickets to Neutral Milk Hotel's secret show at the Knitting Factory anyway."
"OK, we'll write an apology, then go decompress at the Life Cafe."
"Can we do a staff star pose before we leave?"
"Of course we can."
Fuck you, Brooklyn!
