But if Twitter is down, how can I tweet my complaints about Twitter being down?!?!?
Twitter Completely Down
181–190 of 194 posts
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a large manufacturer having a power outage, for, an hour like we are here, would cause a great deal of trouble with anything downstream of that manufacturer. And I'd be willing to bet that industry sources, mailing lists, forums, (whatever the manufacturing equivalent of HN is) would be discussing the outage, how bad it is, how this is going to completely screw up profits, how irritated they are, etc, etc.
You don't think GM or Ford have ever lost power for an hour? Did you ever read about it? Did the car dealerships suddenly run out of cars for one hour three weeks later? I think you are vastly overestimating the impact transient events like this have.
And I think you are vastly underestimating the percieved impact by the people involved, which was kind of my point.
Both Twitter going down for an hour and a plant that assembles cars going down for an hour aren't that big of a deal in the huge scheme of things, but for people who are intimately connected (either work there, know someone who does, are emotionally connected to the product in some fashion, etc), it feels a lot bigger than it is.
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#183I 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 t…
I would argue that people can die when Twitter goes down. In Mexico citizens are using Twitter to alert each other when Drug War violence erupts: readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#184I 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…
That's not really fair, we as humans are bad at risk analysis. Bruce Schneier has written extensively on the role of cognitive biases et al in measuring perceived risk. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/risk_intuition... Googling "Schneier risk" gets you lots and lots of reading material. The only question here is whether Arrington is going to write another Amateur Hour post about this. http://techcrunch.…
I've been looking for years for a good reference that says "human are bad at probability estimation", but this one doesn't seem to work: he's simply saying that we're very good at estimating regular risks (if I understand correctly).
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#185Millions of people couldn't post a status update for hours. It's a terrible day on the internets.
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
People don't expect "incredible" to mean "not credible" anymore.
If it once was "credible" but no longer is, perhaps a more appropriate term is "uncredible" or "decredible".
Of course, that woudl imply that the act of removing credibility from something would be "decrediblizaiton" or "decredencing".
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I would argue that people can die when Twitter goes down. In Mexico citizens are using Twitter to alert each other when Drug War violence erupts: readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php
Maybe they need to tackle the underlying drug problem, rather than twitter fix it's downtime problem? The world revolved before twitter, and it will continue to revolve long afterwards.
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Is this really a valid conclusion to come to at this point? I expect downtime in any service I operate. It's just how the world work…
Do you expect Google search to have downtime?
Yes, and it has happened.
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that people can die when Twitter goes down. In Mexico citizens are using Twitter to alert each other when Drug War violence erupts: readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php
Maybe they need to tackle the underlying drug problem, rather than twitter fix it's downtime problem? The world revolved before twitter, and it will continue to revolve long afterwards.
I don't know the internal workings of Twitter, but if it isn't significantly easier to improve its downtime than to fix Mexico's drug violence, I'd argue they've made some non-trivial engineering mistakes somewhere.
Re: Twitter Completely Down
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
They definitely lose money - their ad model is based on engagement, so if tweets aren't seen/can't be acted on, money is lost.
Extra reliability and redundancy costs money. More or less than money lost while the service is down? I of course can't answer that.