【Submission Season 1 Episode 1 (2016)】

UPDATED 7:10 p.m. ET with information from a group claiming responsibility for the hack.

Tumblr went down for over two hours this afternoon as a result of a large-scale DDoS attack. A group claiming to be Submission Season 1 Episode 1 (2016)behind the attack contacted Mashablewith one clear message: This was for the lulz.

But what was funny to the hackers was frustrating for Tumblr users, who took to Twitter to complain in droves about the outage.

What happened

Online status tools first reported the site was down a little after 3:15 p.m. ET. The service said on Twitter that some users were experiencing "latency."

Some users are experiencing latency affecting the dashboard. We’ll get it fixed ASAP.

— Tumblr (@tumblr) December 21, 2016

The site came back online for a few minutes at around 3:52 p.m. ET, before going back offline. At around 4:22 p.m. ET, a Tumblr spokesperson told Mashablethe company was working on the issue, but offered no further details.

At around 5:45 p.m. ET, service was restored to the site. That said, Tumblr's Twitter page didn't give the all clear until 6:22 p.m.

Okay! Everything's fixed, and Tumblr is back to its usual self. Apologies for the interruption, and thanks again for all your patience.

— Tumblr (@tumblr) December 21, 2016

Claiming responsibility

While Tumblr was still down, Mashablewas contacted on Twitter by R.I.U. Star Patrol, a group claiming responsibility for the attacks.

@mashable We are claiming responsibility for the Tumblr outage #StarPatrol

— R.I.U. Star Patrol (@StarPatrolling) December 21, 2016

The account started tweeting about the attack just before the outage hit, and retweeted responses to the service stoppage as the situation played out. The timestamps correspond roughly to the time between when Tumblr went down initially and when service was fully restored.

;) @tumblr

— R.I.U. Star Patrol (@StarPatrolling) December 21, 2016

Attacks stopped on Tumblr this was the final wave of ddos attacks against the service for now.

— R.I.U. Star Patrol (@StarPatrolling) December 21, 2016

Via DM, the group told Mashablethe DDoS attack wasn't meant to harm anyone.

"There is no sinister motive," they replied when asked for the cause of the attacks."It's all for light hearted fun."

The group also accurately predicted via message when Tumblr would go back online.

Mashableis reaching out to online security experts to verify the likelihood that this group was indeed behind the DDoS assault.

The freak out

The site's users were not pleased by the outage and took to Twitter to respond in the only way they know how: GIFs.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Some users even speculated that the outage might be connected with the season finale of Yuri on Ice, a popular anime series with a huge Tumblr community. But it appears as if Yuri on Ice wasn't Tumblr's problem.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

(Editor: {typename type="name"/})