2011 was a great year Tumblr however it had a huge area of opportunity on the technological area due to constant outages. Even Matt Inman from The Oatmeal noticed this and developed his own version of the "fail-whale" for Tumblr and thus the TumblBeasts were born. They are fictional mascots used to indicate their temporary service interruptions (also known as “503 Service Unavailable”).
They became so popular that Tumblr officially used it as their error message:
Naturally we had to intervene and created a never-ending game for tumblr users to entertain themselves with once the website failed.
