Tumblr was down for over two hours yesterday afternoon as a result of a large-scale DDoS attack.
A group claiming to be behind the attack gave the clear message: "This was for the Lulz." But what was funny to the hackers was especially frustrating to Tumblr users, who took to Twitter to protest the outage.
Online status tools initially reported that the website went down shortly after 3:15 p.m. The service said on Twitter that some users were experiencing “lags.”
"Some users are experiencing a lag affecting their dashboard. We'll fix it ASAP." — Tumblr (@tumblr) December 21, 2016
The site came back up for a few minutes around 3:52 p.m., before going offline again. At around 4:22 p.m., a Tumblr spokesperson said the company was working on the issue, but did not provide further details.
Around 5:45 p.m., service was restored. However, Tumblr's Twitter page didn't give the green light until 6:22 p.m. The account began tweeting about the attack shortly before the hit and retweeted replies during the outage as the situation unfolded.
The hacker group stated, however, that the DDoS attack was not intended to harm anyone.
"There is no ulterior motive," he replied when asked about the reason for the attacks. "It's all done for fun."
The team also accurately predicted when Tumblr would come back!
Users of the site weren't happy about the outage at all, and took to Twitter to respond in the only way they know how: GIFs. Some even speculated that the outage could be tied to the season finale of Yuri on Ice, a popular anime series with a huge Tumblr community.
But it seems that Yuri on Ice wasn't Tumblr's problem after all!
