Tumblr Queue, Where Are You! ☀
The Tumblr queue feature has been inoperative since Friday afternoon (18 May 2012). That is an outage length now approaching 3 days. The Twitter is lit up with Tumblr users sharing their grief over this state, and an email I fired off to Tumblr support was greeted, almost immediately, with the following reply contents:
Our engineers are aware of this issue and are working to fix it as soon as they can. Thanks for your patience.
Nothing is more infuriating than an unanswered query. Except for a “canned” one that gives no information, no status, no estimation of time to resolution.
Yes, things break, and sometimes, a thorny mess must be sorted out in order to remedy. But here is something that is easily accomplished — communication of problem status. Like, you know, alerting your users^H^H^H^H^H, er customers, of repair efforts, so they can plan accordingly. Maybe a dedicated static page, or blog or Tumblr that gives Tumblr users updates on when service will be restored. Here is an example by this web hosting company. In contrast to this lame effort.
Share something, anything:
This feature is horribly broken, and we do not know when we will ever get it up and running again (similar to our Search functionality).
A major reconstructive effort is required and we have the queue fixed by the start of the next month.
We’re working furiously to resolve this condition ASAP, we estimate another day to get it right, but it might take a week.
The queue should be again operative at any moment now.
Is that so difficult?
Now, cue up the chorus of Tumblrati that will scold me over griping about a free service.
