Tumblr users were welcomed with a few strange occurrences on their blogs this morning. Images not posted by the users, including NSFW images, were posted to blogs and weren’t able to be deleted. According to TechRadar on Aug. 21, many thought Tumblr had been hacked.
However, according to TechCrunch's Sarah Perez , the issue was caused by data corruption or infrastructure failure. A Tumblr spokesperson clarified that there was no outside attack upon Tumblr. The failure, which lasted 15 minutes, according to the spokesperson was causing the random posts, the inability to deleted them as well as the lack of access to the dashboard for some users.
Tumblr users were complaining that the site has also been down about 9 hours before the incident and that Tumblr’s official response came about 12 hours after the fact. There’s also murmurings about how no ETA has been issued for when the problem will be solved.
Bugs have been reported before but a threat researcher at ThreatTrack Security notes that what’s alarming about this incident is that Tumblr, now under Yahoo’s guidance, has been encouraging more advertisers and corporations to use Tumblr as part of their outreach plans. However, with the threat of an infrastructure failure that could lead to NSFW content being splayed across their blog, corporations may take a step back until there’s no way this could happen again.
As Tumblr works to figure out just what is going on and why, they've issued the following tweet:
Our engineering team is working quickly to repair an issue causing incorrect posts to appear on a small number of affected blogs.
— Tumblr (@tumblr) August 21, 2013
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/tumblr-users-seeing-random-posts-about-vaccuums-nsfw-content?cid=roadrunner