In case you've been living in a shell (or hopelessly addicted to Grand Turismo 5 all weekend like I was) you've probably noticed the massive downtime that Tumblr has been suffering. In the grand scheme of things this isn't really that big of a deal. It's basically the web version of scrambled cable. I understand that lots of people have come to depend on services like tumblr, in fact I use it for cataloging videos that I love. I'd post a link to it, but it's down right now. Future plans of site expansion involve bringing that feed to the main page and featuring that content more aggressively, and this has made me wonder about its stability.

I've also designed sites for clients that utilize the data from these types of services whether it be flickr, twitter, whatever. Sometimes building on the backbones of these free services can save a lot of time and money when you're dealing with small businesses or independent clients. The outage this weekend has reminded me of the risks involved in doing so. Then again, any time you're using content fed from another source you always run the risk of changes to the API anyway (I'm looking at you, Facebook), so it might just be a bit of a wash.

That being said, let's not let the symptoms of tumblr withdrawl cause us to act irrationally. These types of outages are rare, and while it is an inconvenience to have an interruption in service it's much more convenient to receive this service for free 100% of the time. Although I agree, Mr. Glover, Tumblr should get back to interneting and shit.

UPDATE:

There were actually a few instances of this that stood out to me as i thought more about it. One is a friend of mine who runs a public tumblr blog as way of categorizing research he uses for his job. I could see how a lockout of that content may have a short term impact on your ability to do your business, but in all honesty, something that close to your livelihood should probably be backed up. Another interesting example is Cargo, a service which hosts a great deal of creative portfolios. Obviously an outage of your main representation would be an issue, but again, I would say you should have a backup plan. At least Cargo is a paid service, so users have some sort of recourse as a consumer.