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.