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Discord Incident – Resolved

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Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#31

Post by bayindirh »

piva00 wrote: post #30
Aurornis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I have different memories about the instability of Internet services in the past than some people do. Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.

Yeah, netsplits were really common; nickserv and/or chanserv not working for long periods making popular channels a hell without ops. I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.

Ah yes. chanserv and nickserv hiccups were bad. I remember that now, but they were not as catastrophic as outages we see today.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#32

Post by eowln »

this_user wrote: post #8
113 wrote: post #3

It's not a novel opinion but I'm tired of things being fucked all the time.

It's gonna get a lot worse with all the AI slopcode that is about to be pushed directly to production.

I predict in the future many will blame the poor overall quality of software and the poor uptime of services on AI, as if things weren’t terrible before AI.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#34

Post by aroman »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #26
aroman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, when freenode would go down it was more or less the same thing, no?

Not remotely. IRC is distributed and federated. Not only are there countless networks, each network has countless servers, and each group of servers that are up and can see each other can operate on their own, all the way down to a single server, or up to any subset up to all. When a peering connection goes down and the network splits, maybe some people in the group disappear, or maybe from your point of view everyon…

You're arguing against a claim I did not make.

Freenode had full-network outages periodically. ddos attacks, infrastructure failures etc. and when those happened, the practical experience was the same... people waited it out. Nobody coordinated a mass migration to undernet or stood up alternative servers for a few hours. (It took much bigger issues - social/organizational/political, not technical - to catalyze the mass migration.)

You're making an argument about the virtues of decentralization - and I agree, decentralization is great! Just in practical reality, freenode (not IRC itself) had exactly the same failure mode as we just saw today.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#35

Post by jstummbillig »

rweichler wrote: post #2

Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.

I don't exactly know what you are comparing. No popular IRC network came anywhere near what we would find acceptable in terms of reliability today. It was an absolutely (wonderful) wildfire.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#38

Post by uproarchat »

Analemma_ wrote: post #7
rweichler wrote: post #2

Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.

How would that have been different in the IRC days?

In the IRC days you could have been running your own server for you and friends. It would've taken something much worse, like your VPS dying or something upstream failing.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#39

Post by anyfoo »

jstummbillig wrote: post #35
rweichler wrote: post #2

Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.

I don't exactly know what you are comparing. No popular IRC network came anywhere near what we would find acceptable in terms of reliability today. It was an absolutely (wonderful) wildfire.

Netsplits, where the entire IRC network would "split" into two (or more) effectively independent networks because some a link between two servers went down, were extremely common. I don't know if daily, or weekly, but common enough to be perceived as normal and expected in any case.

In the earlier days of IRC, netsplits were sometimes used for channel takeover. If someone was on a split off part of the net where there were so few people in the channel that they could obtain op status, they could kill and ban the "legitimate" ops when the nets joined back together.

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