It Wasn’t Hacked, You Weren’t Crazy: Tumblr Got a Little Weird Last Night

The great amalgamated beast that is Tumblr shivered in its sleep last night, but did the shaking of its mighty rainbow tinted hackles cause the strange reblogs and seemingly permanent posts that plagued many users, or did the creature’s stirrings merely communicate the terror of its userbase? Do past and future, nay, causality itself even have an effect on the slumbering giant that scientists have determined is clearly, but inexplicably, Tumblr’s physical avatar on the material plane, manifest in deep inside a cave on the outskirts of a small desert town?

Have I been listening to to much Welcome to Night Vale? I mean, yes, but lets talk about what happened on Tumblr last night.

Many Tumbler users noticed a whole suite of weird behavior from the site in the wee hours of last night. Accounts began to spontaneously reblog seemingly random posts from across the whole of Tumblr, some of which could not be deleted by the user. Some of these reblogs were even of the not safe for work variety, which I’m sure was a particular annoyance to anyone who has their Tumblr set to automatically post to Facebook or Twitter. But if you are worried about your personal information, you can at least breathe easy: a Tumblr spokesperson told TechCrunch:

Earlier this morning, an infrastructure failure lasting roughly fifteen minutes led posts created in this window to become corrupt. No data was lost, but this has been causing inconsistent behavior for these affected blogs. Our engineering team is working quickly to correct the situation.

Even if the random posts didn’t affect your blog particularly, you might have seen some of the appearing on your Tumblr feed. I saw a number of things in my feed this morning from blogs that I don’t even follow. Tumblr’s people are on the case, however, tweeting this around 11:30 this morning:

Tumblr’s Twitter and official Tumblr blog have not been updated since. If you’re worried about porn on your blog, I suggest you turn off automatic posting to social networks and keep an eye on it. If you’re actually amused by the tiny slices of completely random Tumblr posts on your dash, well, now that I’ve raised that possibility I’m sure someone is working on a script to make that an actual website or plugin, or even a Tumblr blog.

(via TechCrunch.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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