Why Pinterest Was Down Today

sunandsurfmama · June 2011

Here is the reason it was down today:

From: Pinterest <pinbot@pinterest.com>

To: Me

Sent: Monday, June 6, 2011 3:08 PM

Subject: Sorry. We had to delete one of your Pins on Pinterest.

Hi (Me),

This is Ben, the cofounder of Pinterest.com. We don't allow some objectionable or risque content on Pinterest. The reason is that we're still a young company and many of our users want to use Pinterest as a professional tool with clients. We don't like the idea of censoring content, but until we have a better filtering system, we had to remove your pin, "White and blue" from your board "Blue Room".

So you have it, the original source of the image was:https://www.countryliving.com/homes/beach-house-decorating-0409.

Could you please delete any additional pins containing this sort of content and refrain from pinning (or repinning) similar pins in the future?

Please feel free to get in touch should you have any questions. Thanks as always for supporting Pinterest.

Ben

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 12:29 PM,

I wrote:

Dear Ben:

I am puzzled and not sure why this was removed. It is only home decor with absolutely NO objectionable material. Could you please explain? The image came from Country Living magazine, which is a very mainstream family friendly magazine.

https://www.countryliving.com/homes/beach-house-decorating-0409

Ben?s response:

Dear (Me),

I owe you an apology. We had a bad script that was flagging pins as objectionable. This was an error on our end, and we have brought down Pinterest in order to get it fixed.

Our lead engineer Yash is working hard right now to figure out what caused this bug and to try and put steps in to prevent it from happening again.

I hope you can accept our apology. We care a lot about creating a great experience and it's heartbreaking when a bug like this impacts people who are using our site.

Sincerely,

Ben