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Twitter Completely Down

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Re: Twitter Completely Down

#71
post #14

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

Twitter Site Issue 17 seconds ago Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

"Users may be experiencing difficulties accessing Twitter"? Weasel words are so annoying and unnecessary. "Twitter is down." would do.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#72
I'm glad this made it to the front page. Is the topic itself newsworthy? Not on its own. Is all the discussion that's flooding into this thread worth having?

Yep. Even the subthread from the person complaining that this isn't newsworthy.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#73
post #2

Not only is the website down, but it seems the entire API is as well.

Yep - stalling out big time. Good chance to test your error handling in a real world scenario!

Have just had to add timeouts to a few requests to the twitter API. Was completely hanging a whole site. Learn't something though, to never trust an API to respond in a reasonable amount of time!

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#74

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…

Your examples describe two entirely different systems. The failover of a software product is drastically different from the failover of a power system. Trying to map everything back to a common best practice under the category of "risk" seems like it would miss out on important intricacies.

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#75

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowups_Happen

Re: Twitter Completely Down

#78

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…

Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.

That's not necessarily true. People don't die when twitter is down, and whatever twitter's business model actually is, I am not even sure there is a monetary penalty to them being down (unlike, say, Amazon being down which results in lost orders). They may have made the calculation that it was not cost effective engineering-wise to chase that extra 0.001% of reliability.

[Edit: Pedantry shield: Ok, ok, should have said people don't die because twitter is down. Obviously people are dying all the time, and some will indeed expire while twitter is down].

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