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Twitter Completely Down

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Re: Twitter Completely Down

#61

Post by willtheperson »

jgrahamc wrote: post #39
kristofferR wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is newsworthy at least. Sure, being upset/getting angry just because of a little bit of Twitter downtime is stupid, but that doesn't take away from the fact that one of the biggest and most important discussion and communication channels the web has is completely down.

I don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.

I think it's only newsworthy in this space - where, as some of us are the ones responsible for these systems - we are trying to learn why this happened in order to prevent it.

You know, learn from others mistakes and all.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#62

Post by peterwwillis »

steve8918 wrote: post #47

I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…

Accidents happen.

(expanding my reply) No risk assessment in the world will stop a cage monkey from tripping over a pile of 1Us and falling onto the big red button. Figure out what your pain threshold is and live with it.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#63

Post by arrel »

steve8918 wrote: post #47

I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…

I'd guess the higher ups at Twitter have run the cost benefit in their head (and probably many spreadsheets) plenty of times, and in most cases spending your limited resource on disaster recovery preparation just isn't worth it. Their site being down does not qualify as a "disaster" - they'll be back up soon, then we'll all be tweeting away again within minutes.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#65

Post by jgrahamc »

willtheperson wrote: post #61
jgrahamc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.

I think it's only newsworthy in this space - where, as some of us are the ones responsible for these systems - we are trying to learn why this happened in order to prevent it. You know, learn from others mistakes and all.

I agree that learning from why Twitter was down will be interesting and when that story comes out I hope it will be high on Hacker News. But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#66

Post by bithive123 »

kristofferR wrote: post #54
k3n wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case. Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, bu…

99,9% of people doesn't care at all about how technically innovative something is, they only care about how useful it is. And Twitter is incredibly useful.

"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#67

Post by wyclif »

larrys wrote: post #37
aeurielesn wrote: post #10

Twitter Status - http://status.twitter.com/ No news at the status site either, that beats the purpose of having a dedicated status site.

They just updated: http://status.twitter.com/

Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

That's called understatement.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#69

Post by jaxn »

leot wrote: post #36

Twitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.

s/protocol/abstraction layer/

What is great about Twitter is that it allows both the sender and the receiver to choose if they want to interact over the web, through an app, via SMS or even email (receiving DMs). Take the lowest common denominator across all platforms (no subejct, max 160 chars in SMS) and sit in the middle as an abstraction.

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