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X: All Tweets Disappeared

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21–25 of 25 posts

Re: X: All Tweets Disappeared

#21
post #15

I’m not surprised to see Twitter’s reliability get progressively worse. Overall, I think they could have reduced engineering staff in the long term by adopting mainstream open source technologies instead of their own custom (albeit also oss) database/filesystem/streaming system/rpc library/spark stack. But those migrations would have taken years. Instead, slashing staff that fast is likely to cause slow rot of their…

You think Twitter / X is bad for reliability, then you haven't seen the frequency of GitHub outages for over 100M+ users for over 3 years and this is with having Microsoft's backing. Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated with something breaking over there every week. I have not seen anything else break more times than GitHub even having Microsoft footing the bill and they should have a much higher uptime than Tw…

> Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated

This isn't exactly a hard concept to grasp though: it's entirely possible to use GitHub and still be productive when it's temporarily offline; Git doesn't stop working on your local machine because GitHub is down.

It's literally impossible to use Twitter when it's temporarily offline. There is no "offline" mode for Twitter.

There is also the argument to be made that (a) what GitHub does is orders of magnitude more complex than what Twitter does, and (b) I don't recall anyone buying a controlling stake in GitHub and then loudly declaring that it doesn't need all those staff and firing (IIRC) all but one of the Ops team.

Re: X: All Tweets Disappeared

#22
post #14

This is the 3rd time I've seen a topic on this subject. Need to start merging IMO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367

Or just flag them. HN is a lousier downforeveryoneorjustme than downforeveryoneorjusme. And the threads go stale pretty fast.

It was a partial outage. It looks like core features were truly down, but various down-detectors we're reporting that Twitter was still up.

Re: X: All Tweets Disappeared

#23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just flag them. HN is a lousier downforeveryoneorjustme than downforeveryoneorjusme. And the threads go stale pretty fast.

It was a partial outage. It looks like core features were truly down, but various down-detectors we're reporting that Twitter was still up.

The perennial problem of shallow monitoring checks; let's call them "Layer 5", vs. specific checks, let's call them "Layer 7".

Re: X: All Tweets Disappeared

#24

I’m not surprised to see Twitter’s reliability get progressively worse. Overall, I think they could have reduced engineering staff in the long term by adopting mainstream open source technologies instead of their own custom (albeit also oss) database/filesystem/streaming system/rpc library/spark stack. But those migrations would have taken years. Instead, slashing staff that fast is likely to cause slow rot of their…

I'm surprised Twitter is functional at all, at this point, considering how many people were laid off arbitrarily. The problem of arbitrary layoffs is vaporizing critical institutional knowledge and history necessary to support and extend particular internal services effectively.

Re: X: All Tweets Disappeared

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Twitter / X is bad for reliability, then you haven't seen the frequency of GitHub outages for over 100M+ users for over 3 years and this is with having Microsoft's backing. Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated with something breaking over there every week. I have not seen anything else break more times than GitHub even having Microsoft footing the bill and they should have a much higher uptime than Tw…

> Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated This isn't exactly a hard concept to grasp though: it's entirely possible to use GitHub and still be productive when it's temporarily offline; Git doesn't stop working on your local machine because GitHub is down. It's literally impossible to use Twitter when it's temporarily offline. There is no "offline" mode for Twitter. There is also the argument to be made that (a) wh…

The economics are different too. If Github is down, they're still 'making money' as long as their customers aren't so annoyed that they cancel.

Twitter needs to be serving ads to make money (primarily).

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