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Twitter was down

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Re: Twitter was down

#321

Post by IncRnd »

ctvo wrote: post #301
IncRnd wrote: post #237

The headline may overstate whatever happened. I'd never used tweetdeck prior to now. Yet, it just now loaded fine for me. Once it loaded, I clicked a button that said something like, "setup some fields", and then tweets were displayed. What's not working? I'm just a free user of twitter.

> The headline may overstate whatever happened. Or... it was broken for normal users and is now fixed. The newspaper said there was a fire at this building? Yet, it looks fine to me now?

It is an overstatement to say something is broken, when it comes online 10-20 minutes later.

Re: Twitter was down

#322

Post by zzzeek »

sidfthec wrote: post #209
paxys wrote: 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…

#1 is what non-tech people said. #2 is what hardcore Elon fans said. #3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.

certainly not all of them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33498116

Re: Twitter was down

#323

Post by d23 »

wtf_is_up wrote: post #295
d23 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did this meme of them being a cash incinerator come from (other than from Musk, hoping people didn't look into the public statements)? Last time I looked, they had a few profitable quarters on the books. Looking at the last annual statement, I see a 200M loss on 5B revenue, with them sitting on 8B in assets, 2B of which is in cash. That's nothing close to a cash incinerator. As far as I can tell, tightening up…

> who appears to have made the problem 100x worse. Where is that reflected in the quarterly earnings report?

100x was rhetorical. It's not a public company anymore, so we can't know. But if the headlines reporting a 40% drop in revenue are true, that would bring the net loss from 200M a year to 2.2B a year, which would be 10x worse (though I don't even know if you were being that specific in your critique), but that also doesn't take into account whatever he saved from chopping headcount.

Re: Twitter was down

#324

Post by MrOwnPut »

CameronNemo wrote: post #307
Tostino wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Don't fire or alienate hordes of engineers with firm-specific talent. Especially for a product/service as mature as Twitter.

Or else your site for logged out users will go down for an hour?

What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon?

I really don't see the reason for this artificial drama. Do other "X service is down" threads go this way?

People say Elon is dramatic, but this thread is honestly ridiculous and way more dramatic than anything I've seen him post.

Re: Twitter was down

#325

Post by smotched »

sidfthec wrote: post #209
paxys wrote: 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…

#1 is what non-tech people said. #2 is what hardcore Elon fans said. #3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.

#4 Massive cuts don't just mean people but include nonessential features of your product.

Re: Twitter was down

#326

Post by CameronNemo »

rgbrenner wrote: post #122
petercooper wrote: post #51

On an unrelated point, Californian employees in the main layoff were employed till January 4 for legal reasons. Many of them were demanding their contracted 2 months' severance to follow that. Now that 2 months have just passed, does anyone know if they received this pay?

No... he got the class action thrown out because of an arbitration clause... so each individual case must go through arbitration, and those are all still pending (when I checked a week or two ago).

That could cost him a lot more in the long run... arbitration ain't cheap and these employees are probably quite motivated to pursue it.

Re: Twitter was down

#327

Post by swatcoder »

xwdv wrote: post #269
paxys wrote: 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…

4. The institutional knowledge is not gone, in the event of any massive catastrophe employees who previously worked at Twitter can return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur. It’s pay as you go.

> return as “consultants” and charge very high rates to fix issues as they occur.

I'm sure there are some people who would do that, but those opportunities become very expensive-to-impossible when you burn bridges the way certain new management has. People hold personal value on things like respect and principle that can make them behave "irrationally" in naive analyses like this.

Re: Twitter was down

#328

Post by ColinWright »

EarlKing wrote: post #274
dom96 wrote: post #197

Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me

[flagged]

My instance and my timelines have zero loli and zero furry porn.

Clearly your experience of Mastodon differs significantly from mine.

Re: Twitter was down

#329

Post by parrellel »

EarlKing wrote: post #280
numpad0 wrote: post #186

PSA: Mastodon, Misskey, Nostr, Bluesky exists now. Just top 3 Mastodon instances(mastodon.social, pawoo.net, mstdn.jp) collectively has > 2mil users, same level as Twitter in 2008. Misskey, an ActivityPub/Mastodon compatible server software, now has >10K users. Nostr isn't much, Bluesky is still invite only and had just went past 2k registered, but those are all available options for direct substitutes to Twitter in…

[flagged]

Twitter was definitely better at keeping the weird porn siloed off the front pages, but this is a weird thing to twig on given the massive number of commissioned "art" collectives drawing naked fox people on twitter?

Re: Twitter was down

#330

Post by siva7 »

random314 wrote: post #254
jjeaff wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but my recollection is that the whale fail was usually due to huge growth or unprecedented traffic peaks. I don't think Twitter is growing at a fast rate any longer.

It also comes from it's history as a Ruby on rails site and disappeared once the the servers moved to scala on the JVM.

Rails was never meant to be run on such a massive load. It was the perfect framework to get twitter take over the market but once that goal was reached a rewrite was unavoidable with a tech stack that can sustain such a load.
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