Tumblr, the microblogging service for the hip and with-it, is currently down. It appears that hordes from the chaotic message board 4chan are to blame. Welcome to round two of the Tumblr-4chan war!

There's not much information about the feud, outside of lots of Twitter chatter. According to a popular thread on 4chan, users are overloading Tumblr services with a DDoS attack using a web-based version of their Low Orbit Ion Cannon tool.

Tumblr acknowledged an "issue causing a subset of blogs to be unavailable" in a Tweet an hour ago.

The drama started this past weekend, with an influx of bots onto Tumblr, which started spreading ominous messages of an impending "invasion". Tumblr users apparently responded by organizing their own raid against 4chan, and the site has been intermittently down all day. (Much of the planning apparently was done on Tumblr blogs that are now inaccessible, thanks to the 4chan attack.)

A quick survey of the trash talk on Twitter and 4chan suggests that the same factions of tween and tweenagers that duked it out in the 4chan-Tumblr war of last November have rejoined in battle, and for similar reasons. That past battle was sparked by 4chan users' anger over Tumblr "stealing" their memes. One Tumblr partisan on Twitter wrote of today's fracas: "Yo, 4chan, stop talking shit about Tumblr, you cunts. No one owns memes, bastards. Get your head out of our ass."

Last time, 4chan admins effectively quashed the war by censoring all mentions of "tumblr" on the board. We'll update as more information come in.

Update: Tumblr says in a tweet that its down time is due to hardware failure: "Two hardware failures in the same database cluster have dramatically lowered performance for those blogs." The downtime could conceivably be unrelated to 4chan's DDoS attack, given that Tumblr has noticeable downtime about ever other day. But it would be very interesting timing!

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