Tumblr is down alot. But with the new Tumbeasts, as CNN reports, faith in the brand may actually be strengtehened..

CNN reports:

Amusing error mascots are popular with users, but they can also deliver a bottom-line payoff: Being direct about screw-ups often strengthens users’ faith in a brand.

“The spirit of transparency is the new order,” says Michael Gaiss, senior vice president at branding consultancy Highland Capital Partners. “Plus, being funny probably lightens the bad press around problems.”

The most iconic of these efforts is Twitter’s “Fail Whale” – the microblogging site even refers to errors as “whales” in its system status updates. Twitter’s history of crash whimsy runs deep: Before it introduced the whale, it had the error kitten.

Giant Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) has jumped on the trend. Google Books piggybacked on Twitter’s theme, creating its own Moby Dick-esque Fail Whale for when the service “is having trouble finding that page.”