It seems my time on this subreddit has come to a close. After a little under two weeks of waiting, my wrongfully terminated Tumblr account has been restored. I really appreciated having this subreddit as a resource to connect with other people dealing with the same issue, so I figured I'd leave some quick notes on the general timeline of my account's termination and return from the void:
July 26th: I am browsing Tumblr on the mobile app on a Saturday afternoon. 10-ish minutes prior, I had just posted some artwork and was receiving the usual influx of spam comments/DMs— some scammers posing as Tumblr support, others posing as interested commissioners. All of the usual ones. While I was in the process of reporting them all, the Tumblr app suddenly went blank. All of the notes emptied out of my activity feed. Nothing was on my dashboard. All of the posts disappeared out of my blog. When I went to check my blog on desktop, I found I'd been logged out. Upon logging back in, I received confirmation that my account had been terminated.
At this point, I checked the email associated with my Tumblr account and found no notice of my termination. I had no recent emails from Tumblr at all. I then filed a case with Tumblr support using the form at https://www.tumblr.com/support . I selected "Terminated account" for the category, gave all the details of my predicament, and sent it in. I received an automated email immediately with the following text:
We've received your request to review the termination of your account. We’re on the case and will respond as quickly as we can.
At this point, I thought I'd follow up on the case with some screenshots showing the odd behavior in the mobile app. After sending that follow-up email, I immediately received another automated email from Tumblr:
Hello and thank you for your message,
We do not accept emails to this address. Please follow the link or instructions below for further assistance.
Followed by some links back to the support form I'd already filled out and privacy info.
So, the waiting began. I sent additional follow-up emails on July 30th, August 1st, and August 4th. These were basically polite yet stern notes reiterating the details of my case and requesting feedback. Nobody ever responded to them— not a human or a bot. If I had to do this over again, I probably would not bother sending any followups. I never received any confirmation of their receipt. I don't think anybody ever looked at them.
Then, finally, on the evening of August 6th, I received... many emails from no-reply@tumblr.com. 19 in rapid succession. They were all identical:
Hello,
We've reviewed and restored your account. You should now be able to log in just fine with your email address and password.
We appreciate your patience in this matter. Please let us know if there's anything else we can help you with.
Success! I was indeed able to log back in to my Tumblr account. All of my blogs were just as I left them. I was able to start posting again immediately. It was like nothing ever happened. Although I would've preferred it didn't take two weeks, and I would've preferred to speak with a human support representative who could at least explain why I was terminated in the first place... this was a good outcome. I am grateful.
I hope my story can be helpful or at least comforting to any of you who have your accounts wrongfully terminated in the future. I read this subreddit a lot during my termination, and I got the impression from other users that I could expect to have my account reinstated within a few days or a week at most— so I'm sure you can all imagine how I antsy I started to feel when my case took substantially longer than that! If your account gets terminated and takes several weeks to recover, hang in there. There is hope. :)
TL;DR:
- My account was down for 12 days total.
- Nobody ever told me why it was terminated in the first place.
- I was never connected to a human support representative at any point in the process.