Tumblr blackout in PH caused by system error—CICC

Tumblr was mistakenly included in the government's crackdown on illegal online gambling operations, according to the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center.

On March 10, several users in the Philippines raised the alarm after they were unable to access the blogging platform.

The CICC's preliminary findings revealed that a system glitch flagged Tumblr and 17 other legitimate domains.

"While our mission to dismantle the multi-billion peso illegal gambling industry is relentless, we recognize that legitimate digital spaces must be protected. We are currently fine-tuning our automated detection systems to ensure that surgical strikes against cybercrime do not result in collateral damage to the open internet," the agency said in the statement.

It also explained that the domains were submitted through its Site Blocking and Monitoring Dashboard under the illegal gambling category. The dashboard has a "whitelist safeguard" of legitimate gambling domains from PAGCOR and widely used platforms and services, which are automatically excluded from the blocking process. However, some domains were not included in the whitelist and were processed with the reported illicit sites.

Meanwhile, Tumblr celebrated with its own statement, thanking its Philippine users.

"The Republic of the Philippines has officially moved to restore access to Tumblr. Our users in the Philippines should have access restored, if not in the very immediate future," it wrote on X on March 13.

"The Philippine government cited the 'surge of reports' in their press release. In other words, Y'all really did that. In closing: we are so back!"

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking platform where users can create and share short-form content such as text posts, photos, GIFs, videos, links, and quotes.

It was launched in 2007 by David Karp and quickly rose to popularity as a hub for fandom culture.