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Twitter was down

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Re: Twitter was down

#431

Post by jgust »

fallingknife wrote: post #418
jgust wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. Or we could reduce the hoops & cycle time for legal immigration. The US has an opportunity right now to cement itself as the leader in technology for the next 2-3 decades and stave off the impending population growth crisis if we could find a way to enable people who want to live here to live here.

I'm not interested in government policy that allows companies to bring in cheap foreign labor to undercut my compensation. There are 330 million people in the us, so if companies need more engineers, they can pay more and train more. Also, there is no population growth crisis. A decreasing population means less stress on the environment and lower housing costs. Yes, there will be economic effects, but it's hardly cat…

This is a very xenophobic view on immigration, and arguably the status quo. Past performance does not equate to future results, but I think you can draw the conclusion that the immense diversity that exists in the US compared to "rest of world" is a competitive advantage. What would it mean to lean in?

Re: Twitter was down

#432

Post by roboyoshi »

Tostino wrote: post #247
roboyoshi wrote: post #10

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?

- When you fire a lot of engineers, legal, security experts... things will still somehow keep working - Also some people still want to keep working at this place (or must, because of VISA etc); It probably happens all the time, just this time everyone was watching it in full motion. - I was sure this whole takeover was the end of twitter, but somehow with how many users twitter has, it just won't die. Goes to show the advantages of the mass.. probably the same applies to microsoft/google.. - The whole 8$ for a checkmark story.. which destroyed the whole trust in the checkmark basically immediately. The whole verification process (how that worked) - many people shared some insights on that and how much effort it was to fine-tune all of that with the scale of twitter. - The free API just being shut down with basically zero communication to devs. and somehow getting away with it. I guess this is a reoccuring theme in tech that a small company has to be open for developers until it's big enough to turn on them. - With the reduced engineering and the new management, it seems more errors slip into production (and incidents like the one now) - or maybe it just feels like it with all the focus on twitter right now - but anyways, you just see things breaking you normally would not expect to see.. - How people are communicating, or in this case not communicating.

I'm probably not the ideal person to write this down, there was so much stuff going on, some people probably made a whole blog-article series on this. This is just a few of the things that I'm able to remember right now.. and with everything on hn here it gives you some ideas and things to think about. Hope that Helps.

Re: Twitter was down

#433

Post by deely3 »

pictur wrote: post #412
Zetice wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in what is likely the top 1% of Reddit users by volume (I have a problem, send help), and I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. Further, as a dev of 15 years, I’m not even sure what you mean by “crash” here. Are you saying that Reddit serves exclusively 500s or timeouts for a sustained period of time on a weekly basis? Or that it serves more than zero 500s at some point during a given week? Or that…

There is no need for such complex definitions. Reddit is a site that you will probably get an error on if you visit it several times a day.

Thats quite strange, and definitely not my expirience. Maybe you have some issues with ISP?

Re: Twitter was down

#434

Post by Zetice »

pictur wrote: post #412
Zetice wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in what is likely the top 1% of Reddit users by volume (I have a problem, send help), and I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about. Further, as a dev of 15 years, I’m not even sure what you mean by “crash” here. Are you saying that Reddit serves exclusively 500s or timeouts for a sustained period of time on a weekly basis? Or that it serves more than zero 500s at some point during a given week? Or that…

There is no need for such complex definitions. Reddit is a site that you will probably get an error on if you visit it several times a day.

That's my point; as someone who visits it many times a day, I do not get an error on the vast majority of those days.

Re: Twitter was down

#435

Post by not_a_shill »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #212
jedberg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, eventually they would figure out how to rewrite it if they can't get it working again. But I could definitely see a multi-week outage.

Seems to be back up now. Both logged in and logged out states are working. This thread is just an hour old btw, not sure when the issue started. Seems like a huge reaction from HN for an hour long downtime given that Twitter has gone down for longer in the past.

They do this every time. Last thread I saw was Twitter had an outage for only 10k people for a short amount of time and HN was having a victory lap.

I personally don't think that 100% uptime for everyone around the globe is even a worthwhile goal for Twitter. The incremental costs for that last 0.5% aren't worth the incremental benefits.

HA is most necessary for what, journalists? (Who are already antagonized under Musk)

Everyone else can wait the hour.

Re: Twitter was down

#436

Post by bfeynman »

sidfthec wrote: post #413
bfeynman wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media growth is all about recommendations and algorithms, people actually curating their network a la 2010 facebook is dead, so your idea of "how to use social media" is also aligned with completely not knowing how to make a growing social media platform where almost >99% of users are consumers and automatically are recommended things and curate their experience implicitly. People do not want to manually do an…

The general issue of forcing recommendations and the general population not doing anything manually anymore is separate from the fact that as an individual you have lots of tools to curate your feeds on twitter/facebook/etc. It's also just really silly to have conversations like: "I can't stand seeing Elon on my feed!" "Have you blocked him?" "No"

You're missing the point, recommender algorithms are supposed to show people what they want. Even if what you said is true, the experience is absolutely doomed, because its a shitty UX

Re: Twitter was down

#437

Post by Daishiman »

MrOwnPut wrote: post #212
jedberg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, eventually they would figure out how to rewrite it if they can't get it working again. But I could definitely see a multi-week outage.

Seems to be back up now. Both logged in and logged out states are working. This thread is just an hour old btw, not sure when the issue started. Seems like a huge reaction from HN for an hour long downtime given that Twitter has gone down for longer in the past.

It's down for me and hasn't worked for the entire weekend.

Re: Twitter was down

#438

Post by ctvo »

IncRnd wrote: post #321
ctvo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At Twitter's scale? It is not.

Re: Twitter was down

#439

Post by stcroixx »

jgust wrote: post #390
echelon wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you stay at Twitter? Even if you believe in the platform and the mission, this has to be one of the most stressful work environments in tech right now. The only cases I can think of for staying: - Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!) - A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck…

> Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. Or we could reduce the hoops & cycle time for legal immigration. The US has an opportunity right now to cement itself as the leader in technology for the next 2-3 decades and stave off the impending population growth crisis if we could find a way to enable people who want to live here to live here.

Or we could force these tech companies flush with cash to pay market rate and watch salaries rise or let these companies leave the country if they can’t afford to do business here. These are the richest companies on the planet and they don’t need a labor subsidy, they just want one and are powerful enough to get their way.

Re: Twitter was down

#440

Post by banannaise »

roboyoshi wrote: post #10

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.

Seems likely that they used an allowlist rather than a blocklist for the API restriction, and left several critical services out of the allowlist.
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