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Twitter was down

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Re: Twitter was down

#241
post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

Let’s not pretend like Twitter has never had downtime, they literally popularized the “Fail Whale” meme way before Elon was around: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

Since the 2010 nadir of fail whales, Twitter invested a lot into improving their engineering quality.

There's a great 2015 essay by Peter Seibel who was tech lead on their Engineering Effectiveness team:

https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers

I'd guess almost nobody from that era remains at Musk-Twitter.

Re: Twitter was down

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they don't realize now they are being abused even though they have first hand experience, but you realize they are being abused because you have what insight exactly? In other words, what exactly do you think the people working there will "realize years later"? Could you specifically list the abuses being done to these engineers that they are unaware of?

Usually people choose to stay in abusive situations because they don’t believe they’re being abused, or have convinced themselves they have no better option. That doesn’t change the fact the environment is still abusive. There’s a whole swaths of science and research behind this. It’s why domestic violence can continue for years unknown to anyone, even from friends, until it’s not. OP isn’t saying they’re being abuse…

> Usually people choose to stay in abusive situations because they don’t believe they’re being abused

I simply asked OP to list the abuses they think the engineers are unaware of.

> OP isn’t saying they’re being abused as a fact,

OP literally said "It would feel amazing after this much abuse"

Re: Twitter was down

#243
post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

Let’s not pretend like Twitter has never had downtime, they literally popularized the “Fail Whale” meme way before Elon was around: - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

The fail whale was very common during a time of sustained growth when Twitter did not have the infrastructure it has today, but it all but disappeared in recent time.

The fact that things start to fail after that infrastructure has been put on place and running find for a while is noteworthy.

Re: Twitter was down

#244
post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

A simple and short lived glitch does not a #3 make. Twitter is better than ever now. Elon did good.

Re: Twitter was down

#245

Twitter Support just posted: "Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed." https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/163279294226274713...

Are they going to put "fired the people who used to enforce our change control procedures" in the post-mortem?

Hey if those people wanted to keep their jobs they should've bought sleeping bags[1]... oh, wait.

1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/twitter-lays-off-...

Re: Twitter was down

#246
post #22

Their website is broken for normal users. Try visiting anyone's profile page over the web — you'll get a 467 error [0] e.g. Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk

Twitter seems to have fixed that issue. Your link loads fine for me.

Re: Twitter was down

#247

In case people are wondering what this is about: All links and images are not working on twitter right now. Seems like they accidentally included their own services in the api blocklist? Sending best of luck to the engineers. The whole twitter saga has given me a good chunk of valuable "lesson learned" over the last weeks and months.. so thanks for that.

For someone who has tried to avoid hearing as much as possible about this drama (and didn't notice this was about Twitter until looking at the comments), what are the condensed "lesson learned" takeaways if you don't mind elaborating?

Re: Twitter was down

#248
post #2

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

wait, so did they lock themselves out of their api?

They didn't pay $8.

Re: Twitter was down

#249
post #2

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

wait, so did they lock themselves out of their api?

Elon's latest money making strategy: internal teams have to pay $70/mo for access to APIs managed by other teams.

Re: Twitter was down

#250
post #151

There were many different hypotheses on the outcome of Elon firing 80%+ of Twitter employees: 1. The site would crash and burn the next day. 2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around. 3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various s…

Interesting to me that when Twitter was ascendant the same predictions of doom were not made so frequently when the fail whale was a regular occurrence.

It's possible Twitter didn't need to be spending all the money they were to be maintaining five nines or whatever, given the shift in product focus (humans and not a general/universal message bus - bots can't @-mention anymore, etc).

Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where. I doubt people will abandon the platform en masse over a few minutes of downtime here and there. They will lose 100% of users and be down forever if they don't stop the bleeding, however.

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