Tumblr brings in $30M despite stability woes

It looks like it’s easy enough to forget about 24 hours of downtime.

Lite blogging service Tumblr has raised $30 million in a recent round of funding that includes the likes of Sequoia Capital, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing confirms some earlier rumors buzzing around that Sequoia was dropping some serious cash into the casual blogging service.

Tumblr, despite having some growing pains and seeing frequent outages, has flown past other casual blogging services like Posterous. The site lets users create their own blogs from an existing library of templates and hosts those blogs for free.

Activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. Tumblr attracted around 42 million monthly visits to its hosted blog network globally (17 million of which come from the U.S.), while Posterous averages only around 7 million monthly visits on its hosted blogs, according to data from Quantcast.

But Tumblr, which employs about 16 people, has been unable to provide service for hours at a time to its users because of high traffic. The site recently opened up an office in New York, and founder David Karp (pictured) said he plans to expand the team to 20 people.

The New York, N.Y.-based company raised more than $10 million by April, with three rounds of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital participated in the most recent round as well. That brings Tumblr’s total funding up to around $40.2 million — hopefully that’s enough to keep the site from going down for another day.