Be careful about approaching your friends and colleagues right now. They might be a bit irritable as they were unable to get a dose of GIFs and Ryan Gosling memes on Tumblr for the better part of Friday morning.
Yes, the popular blogging service was down for several hours.
According to a note on the official Tumblr Twitter account — yes, Tumblr is indeed on Twitter — there were "slow loading or intermittent errors on certain pages." The service's staff quickly got to work on setting everything right, according to the same tweet, of course.
Despite the assertion that only some pages were showing errors or loading slowly, we've found that every single Tumblr blog we've tried to access was affected. Based on the panic which flooded Twitter, many others were experiencing equally severe issues.
A Tumblr spokesperson offered us the following statement when asked about what's went on with the service:
Tumblr is experiencing network problems following an issue with one of our uplink providers. Recovery is moving quickly and we will return to full service shortly.
Service to appears to have been restored shortly after 2 p.m. ET. Tumblr addicts around the world likely breathed a collective sigh of relief.
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