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Tumblr CEO David Karp via Wikimedia Commons

Tumblr has taken its site offline to work on a major technical problem, the company said.

Tumblr has been suffering service problems for nearly three hours, according to DownRightNow. About an hour ago, Tumblr confirmed that users were having trouble accessing the site. Shortly thereafter, the company tweeted that it had “taken the site down in order to resolve a network issue.”

The platform has struggled with downtime in the past. It has been growing rapidly over the last year, up from about 10 million global unique visitors a year ago to 15.7 million now, according to Quantcast.

The company has been looking to hire reliability engineers.

Update: Late Wednesday, David Karp shared more information about the outage and apologized to users.

“Our engineering processes seriously failed this afternoon and cost you and your blogs nearly 4 hours of downtime and almost 100 million views,” he said in a blog post.

He recognized Tumblr’s less-than-stellar reputation for reliability.

“Painfully, this isn’t the first time this winter I’ve had to give you similar news… We are constantly working to shore up our processes and solidify the stability of this quickly growing network, even more so as we’ve fallen behind the last few weeks,” Karp wrote.