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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#561
post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#562
post #272

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some e…

One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain, is that the very concept of truth is destroyed. I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a…

George Costanza said "it's not a lie of you believe it."

Is it a lie if you don't know or even care if it's true or what it means? That's where we are with Elon Musk.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#563
post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

I’ll play the devils advocate here but frontend devs need to smarten up. This is basic error handling that should have been in place for years. Blocking tweets with 403 or whatever they chose shouldn’t trigger endless retries on short intervals.. ever!

You're right about error handling, but consider that the user who posted this was logged in. The screenshot they post is of a specific tweet, but they reference the home feed being down. What kind of API call was it making where it's asking for a list of tweets to serve to a logged in user and that call is not authenticated? It makes me think that the blocking was implemented improperly.

Unless the home feed being down is simply a side effect - the service that fetches tweets being DDOS'd by other views in the app making numerous non authenticated calls.

But I was also thinking about this earlier today. These days, everybody is so quick to say "the software is easy, it's the community that's hard" - I've even said it myself a few times in the past few weeks, but I think that might be overstated.

Building good software is hard. Keeping it good is even harder. What does the codebase look like for Twitter's front-end at this point?

How many frameworks has the base functionality been ported through? How many quick pivots from product adding features, adjusting things squashed down the ability to address technical debt or even have functioning unit and regression testing?

The fact that this 1. Made it to production and 2. Was not noticed and rolled back immediately (like, in under 30 minutes) is extremely concerning (and obviously very embarrassing.) If I had private data stored on Twitter of ANY kind (like DMs that I don't want getting out - a messaging system rich, famous, and powerful people have been using like email for over a decade), at this point I would be trying to get that data removed however I could, or accept that there's a strong possibility there's going to be a huge data breach and all of the data will be leaked.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#564
post #7

This is interesting. Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429. If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream. Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one would expect from an exponent…

Could someone report the error at press@twitter.com and see what they think about it?

Whoever is in charge of that account went all Oregon Trail on things and caught dysentery

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Some of the remaining engineers may be stuck due to H1B

Canada just changed their immigration program such that they'll accept all H1B holders (working or not) into Canada with a similar visa, but without the requirement to find a job immediately.

Something to look into for any Twitter (or other) engineers who are bound to a company due to lack of options.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andyjsemotiuk/2023/06/28/us-h1-...

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between visa and healthcare matters there are undeniably employees in that exact predicament.

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Have you actually been in a position where you needed to rely on COBRA?

To continue my family's health insurance cost $4000/month. Fifteen years ago.

When I was employed, my employer was paying more than half of that. It was part of my compensation that I took for granted.

With no income, limited savings, a mortgage and a family, I no longer took it for granted.

I was responsible for my poor financial decisions that made that transition even worse than it had to be.

But I can damn well believe there are Twitter employees who have made all the right moves, yet still hesitate to leave their jobs right now.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he’s telling us they’re all content-scrapers. The very concept of truth is eroded.

That's what makes it so perfect when he echos conspiracy theories, Russian talking points, and other whacky talking points and elevates untrustworthy sources by tweeting things like "interesting" catapulting them into everyone's feed.

As someone who doesn't use Twitter too much, what conspiracy theories has Musk echoed or platformed?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-...

It's still not forced to work, unless going back to your home country is worse than working at Twitter?

Have you moved to another country across the world, made it your home, and had to choose between doing stupid things for a corporation bought by a new CEO or uproot your life and go back home? As much as it's sounds like an easy decision, most people won't uproot their life for Twitter.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be the case once H1-Bs are reformed and universal healthcare becomes real. Until then, this is an unrealistic and cruel position.

Whoever survived multiple internal knockout round of reviews would definitely have high value in job marketplace. Believe it or not many people like working in current twitter like arrangement rather than cushy no impact 9-5 jobs.

Well, after today you certainly can't call Twitter engineering "no impact" at least.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#570
post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

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It's been atleast 10 hours into this outage with no fix.

Advertisers, the one group Elon is desperately trying to accommodate, will care.

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