Problems at Posterous: Possible outage, private messages shared

Posterous is currently having “server connectivity issues” that have made the site inaccessible to a number of users. The problems apparently began with “image uploading” issues, but currently are affecting the whole site, according to posts made Wednesday on Posterous’ official Twitter page:

We're looking into some connectivity issues with our servers right now and hope to have them resolved shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience!—
(@posterous) January 11, 2012

Sorry, but our image uploading servers are backed up. We're working on the issue now and will fix shortly. Thx for your patience!—
(@posterous) January 11, 2012

The apparent outage occurred less than an hour after we received a report from a source whose email inbox was inundated midday Wednesday with a series of posts from random Posterous groups, a number of which were apparently meant to be private.

Posterous emails typically contain all the content of the post, including photos. Posterous is a popular blogging platform that bills itself as “the easiest way to share safely online.”

The recipient of these messages told me via email: “I got like 60 emails from 11:58am Tuesday to 12:10pm — if you click on the link you’ll see that it’s private [because the post is] password-protected when you click through.” Some of the emails he has received by accident include “X-rated” content, which could be evidence of spam. But other messages are from standard-looking private family groups.

A Posterous representative said the company is looking into the email issue, and has heard one other report of such activity in the past two days: “We have seen a pretty big spike in usage over the last week, some of which has been driven by increased spam. Our hunch is that this is what the user saw but we definitely want to confirm.”

The spokesperson also said that the email issue and the server connectivity issue are “unrelated.”

We’ll update this post with any further details we receive.

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