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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#721

Post by idiftl »

olalonde wrote: post #715
evan_ wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s necessarily saying the self-inflicted DDoS has caused a technical issue that’s forced them to shut down access. I think it’s possible that shutting down anonymous access caused the DDoS, which led to giant spikes in some metric , which led them (Elon) to conclude that there was an uptick in scraping, so they imposed the 600/tweet/day limit to punish scrapers. Seems like either my quota reset or the…

According to Elon, shutting down anonymous access was itself an emergency measure to deal with the DDoS[0]. Twitter did increase the quota significantly from earlier today[1]. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449

The links won’t load

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#723

Post by mochaki »

poisonarena wrote: post #701
Rimbo wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right; the person you're replying to might have zero idea. Now me... I know someone personally who was a senior exec for Twitter's software team, who left after Elon's purge. He left because all the people who understood the system and could predict the side effects were fired or left. He'd been with companies going through death spirals before, and had no interest in being involved with another one. So,…

[flagged]

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#724

Post by brigandish »

> There must have been an insane nest of logic that the devs had to tiptoe through to make the service workable as a private only service.

It seems that this statement can lead to different conclusions based on one's biases for or against Musk / freedom of speech:

1) The code base is a mess because the smaller, current team don't know what they're doing and/or management (i.e. Musk) is pushing them too hard and making poor decisions

2) The code base is a mess because the far greater number of engineers there before didn't know what they were doing and/or management weren't pushing them hard enough and were making poor decisions.

Both could be true but I'm going with something the more complex view that it's a little bit of everything, and that Twitter does seem to be moving in a positive direction overall.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#725

Post by olalonde »

idiftl wrote: post #721
olalonde wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Elon, shutting down anonymous access was itself an emergency measure to deal with the DDoS[0]. Twitter did increase the quota significantly from earlier today[1]. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505 [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675260424109928449

The links won’t load

[0] "Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" (in reference to Twitter requiring users to be logged in)

[1] "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k" (in reference to rate limits which were originally 6K 0.6K and 0.3K)

And another tweet that confirms disabling anonymous access was an emergency measure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825

> This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.

> Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.

> It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#726

Post by jayd16 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #666
jayd16 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

This has absolutely nothing to do with the thundering herd problem.

Explain why not, if you please. If unresponsiveness causes increased traffic, which causes further unresponsiveness, is that not referred to as a thundering herd problem? Is the stated mitigation of a backoff not fully relevant here?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#727

Post by minitoar »

transcriptase wrote: post #717
wpietri wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, good idea. People can go build something against the Twitter API! Oh wait! I'm absolutely going to keep enjoying Musk's comeuppance. In this, consider me a traditionalist. As the Greek tragedies show, people have been enjoying the just punishment of hubris for thousands of years.

You can relish in the idea of Twitter having technical issues as if it hurts Elon in some tangible way, but the fact is he could pull the plug on it tomorrow… simply shut Twitter down entirely. Take the entire value of the company as a personal loss, and give everyone working there $1m for their service. And still be the wealthiest individual on the planet. He could do it another 5 times and still be a billionaire. Y…

I imagine after he did that once or twice his net worth would fall considerably more than the value of Twitter.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#728

Post by wand3r »

pschuegr wrote: post #601
wand3r wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree. I do think the major issue at Twitter is more managerial than engineering though. They likely could have run Twitter at the same output with the current team. The problem is a CEO who is learning on the job by altering basically everything at a superfast pace. The root cause is business & feature experimentation at scale with a tight runway & no executive oversight.

To say he's learning on the job is speculation on your part. He's on the job, I'll give you that.

I mean, I'll give you that, I did chuckle. Frankly, this whole thing is a huge debacle and I can only imagine the context switch penalty being paid going from cars, to ISP, to rockets to Twitter. That said, I personally am astounded by Elon's tenacity. I would definitely not bet against it succeeding, but im not sure I'd bet on its success. If I had to choose though, I would bet on success at like 49/51 odds

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#729

Post by andreygrehov »

> Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in

Well, for one, this sounds just like yet another Elon-hater's comment. In _most_ cases, Elon's businesses are fairly successful, so a sarcastic "Elon's latest genius innovation" doesn't belong here.

For second, how do you know the idea came directly from Elon? It could easily be the result of a brainstorming session led by a product team.

Elon is not writing Twitter's code. He is not a Software Engineer at Twitter. Even if the idea came from him, why is he being attacked for a bad deployment?

And lastly, why do people think that the change is bad? There are plenty of web sites that do not allow you to view their content without creating an account first. Is Twitter not allowed to experiment? Why not? I would appreciate hearing well-thought-out arguments that explain the potential negative impact on the business.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#730

Post by alfor »

This is expected with a faster rate of pushing features.

Funny things is Twitter views are hiher than ever and it will be fixed quickly.

(No reason to make a big deal out of it) But I think tests and refactor of the codebase will be necessary to increase their speed of innovation.

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