Twitter was down

Post by jkaplowitz » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

loblollyboy wrote: post #333

bdd wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#4 I work at Facebook. I worked at Twitter. I worked at CloudFlare. The answer is nothing other than #4. #1 has the right premise but the wrong conclusion. Software complexity will continue escalating until it drops by either commoditization or redefining problems. Companies at the scale of FAANG(+T) continually accumulate tech debt in pockets and they eventually become the biggest threats to availability. Not the ne…

Wow, such certainty. "I worked at these companies that went down, so I knew and still know everything, I can even rule out the possibility of other organizations which I did not work for screwing with them, because I know everything about those too. And yes, these FANGs are complex organizations, but not so complex that a former employee like myself wouldn't know what the cause of an outage is or at least isn't (Hell…

Post by degenerate » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 8:56 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #335

bdd wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#4 I work at Facebook. I worked at Twitter. I worked at CloudFlare. The answer is nothing other than #4. #1 has the right premise but the wrong conclusion. Software complexity will continue escalating until it drops by either commoditization or redefining problems. Companies at the scale of FAANG(+T) continually accumulate tech debt in pockets and they eventually become the biggest threats to availability. Not the ne…

Yep, this also matches what I've heard through the grapevine. Pushing bad regex to production, chaos monkey code causing cascading network failure, etc. They're just different accidents for different reasons. Maybe it's summer and people are taking more vacation?

Post by aaroninsf » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

bdd wrote: post #279

rossdavidh wrote: post #100

Ok, this is too many high-profile, apparently unrelated outages in the last month to be completely a coincidence. Hypotheses: 1) software complexity is escalating over time, and logically will continue to until something makes it stop. It has now reached the point where even large companies cannot maintain high reliability. 2) internet volume is continually increasing over time, and periodically we hit a point where…

#4 I work at Facebook. I worked at Twitter. I worked at CloudFlare. The answer is nothing other than #4. #1 has the right premise but the wrong conclusion. Software complexity will continue escalating until it drops by either commoditization or redefining problems. Companies at the scale of FAANG(+T) continually accumulate tech debt in pockets and they eventually become the biggest threats to availability. Not the ne…

Post by iamnothere » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #207

squarefoot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, for most people Twitter is mainstream media.

Twitter is not that popular. The problem is that mainstream journalists spend too much time on it and confuse it for the real world. How many "news" stories are just repackaged tweets? A lot.

Post by loblollyboy » Thu, Jul 11, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

jkaplowitz wrote: post #361

loblollyboy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, such certainty. "I worked at these companies that went down, so I knew and still know everything, I can even rule out the possibility of other organizations which I did not work for screwing with them, because I know everything about those too. And yes, these FANGs are complex organizations, but not so complex that a former employee like myself wouldn't know what the cause of an outage is or at least isn't (Hell…

Former employees and current employees talk via unofficial online and offline backchannels at many companies.