When social media platforms become the latest shiny new thing, they often have trouble scaling to meet the demands of rapidly accelerating numbers of users. Pinterest, the white-hot platform that has many marketers experimenting with visual curation, is no exception, with users reporting periodic outages over the last few weeks.
The site hasn’t yet added its own version of Twitter’s popular Fail Whale, but today users noticed that something had been taken down: the Pinterest search box. According to Pinterest user Maggie McGary, a friend noticed that the search function seemed to be hacked or broken yesterday, with all searches returning the same set of results. Today, the search box is missing completely.
(To see a screen shot of the search box, check out Brankica’s post, Pinterest Traffic Generation SEO.)
Did the pressure of massive growth create a problem? Or was the system hacked in some way? Either way, tens of thousands of users–and a rapidly growing number of brands–are eagerly awaiting its return.
We’re working on getting more details on what happened & will update this post with any new developments.
UPDATE: Here’s how Heidi Kay (@PediaStaff) described the problem she was seeing with Pinterest’s search functionality yesterday:
[tweet https://twitter.com/pediastaff/status/162350773483745280]
UPDATE 1/27: this morning, the search box is back where it belongs!
