Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Tumblr Gets an Oatmeal-Inspired Fail Whale Page of its Own

The much-trafficked blogging service Tumblr has taken a lot of heat over the past year for its extensive downtime issues. And while Tumblr is not alone in its downtime issues, they don't have any amusing downtime page like Twitter's Fail Whale or Foursquare's crying girl.

But that is no longer the case, because they have a downtime page featuring "Tumbeasts" gnawing away at  their server equipment. The catch? The page was designed by The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman. 

For those who don't know, The Oatmeal is an insanely popular online cartoon that garnered over a quarter of a billion page views last year. That's what makes this a smart move on Tumblr's part, because they are taking advantage of The Oatmeal's popularity to make fun of themselves during downtime. In doing so, they are relieving a small portion of the backlash from their outages.

Of course, simply fixing the outages themselves would be the best solution.