Nineteen hours and counting, and the microblogging service Tumblr is still down. Will the hive of blogger one upsmanship return before Brooklyn is reduced to flames and online writers start turning on their cats?

No one, even Tumblr itself, seems to know; the blogging service said it was "almost through" with its recovery six hours ago. In the meantime the seething desperation of Tumblrers is coming fast Twitter. Which, along with Facebook, Wordpress, Blogger and any number of other platforms is a perfectly usable alternative to Tumblr co-founder David Karp's temporarily paralyzed $135 million writing-and-sharing platform. Such is the length of the Tumblr outage in microblogging years that there's already a backlash against the backlash against Tumblr — and already a rebuttal against a rumor that Tumblr lost everything. The Associated Press and CNN are chasing this very important story. And still, no answers.

All that's left to do is obsessively check the Tumblr Twitter and Tumblr Tumblr; investigate ways to back up your precious Tumblr the next time you get the chance; wonder if 4Chan is somehow behind this supposed "issue in one of our database clusters" that Tumblr is having; and, as an absolute last resort, do actual work.

Update 5:35 pm ET: Individual Tumblrs are coming back; the Tumblr.com home page and individual dashboards remain down.

["Bumblr" logo by contributor MisterHippity; Tumblr down screenshot via commenter I Hurt I Am In Fashion]