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Australia and NZ experienced a 16h outage last week. Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going

Australia and NZ experienced a 16h outage last week. Was there someone to fix it eventually? Sure. Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? I'm going with no. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2023/01/twitter-down-australia/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2023/01/twitter-down-australia/

snvzz 4y ago
They've likely learned a lot from that incident already. No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.
- fortyseven 4y ago
  [flagged]
- jmcgough 4y ago
  If they hadn't purged the entire staff they wouldn't need to relearn the same lessons
- nitwit005 4y ago
  > No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense. It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.
recuter 4y ago
I take it no such outages occurred in the prior history of twitter?
- input_sh 4y ago
  16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific. Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
  - recuter 4y ago
    Well, RIP twitter I guess. Although strangely if I search the news archives for outages with date set to before 2022..
    - input_sh 4y ago
      You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging! I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality. Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
      - recuter 4y ago
        > I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016 Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-down-over-web-and-mobile#comments https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d... Amusing comments over there from readers. You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.
        input_sh 4y ago
        How is that against what I said? I said no outage lasted over an hour since 2016 and you disprove that by posting a 2016 article of an outage that lasted maybe two hours? (I don't know, the article doesn't specify.) Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.
rvz 4y ago
[flagged]
- input_sh 4y ago
  No, they happened. They didn't last a double digit number of hours though. Not gonna say in decades, but in the past decade for sure.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Nobody said "absolutely no outages happened [..] for decades" and the fact that they did doesn't refute what you're replying to. You're not being downvoted for not being irrationally angry at Musk. You're being downvoted for being disingenuous in a very obvious way and then pretending the downvotes prove you right.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  I feel that my downvote won’t accurately express my dislike of this comment, so to provide a further explanation: you’re making absolutely zero effort to engage with this conversation. You’ve completely fabricated a point of view to oppose. Nobody here can be construed as being on the opposing side of “things have downtime sometimes”. I’ve every right to believe that you’re an Elon Musk fanboy because your reaction seems incredibly emotionally driven.
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    If anything is emotionally driven, it's your reply. I am also interested to know if outages happened before or is a recent phenomenon. I don't have a stake for electric car space man, or furiously despise him for god knows what as per above.
- wpietri 4y ago
  > simple question really shows the irrationality and emotive reaction about anything Twitter because of Elon Musk I think you're right here, just not in the way you intended. Because this is not a reasonable standard to use: > So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over in the past decade then?
manholio 4y ago
> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it. The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale. The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content. By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.
- invalidname 4y ago
  At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff. But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on. Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
  - 0898 4y ago
    > “At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple“ Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.
philliphaydon 4y ago
Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter? And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?
- highwaylights 4y ago
  Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. This is dire for him.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages. So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
    - highwaylights 4y ago
      This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that. Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase. I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.
- actualwitch 4y ago
  Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.
14 4y ago
Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.

snvzz 4y ago

They've likely learned a lot from that incident already. No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.

fortyseven 4y ago
[flagged]
jmcgough 4y ago
If they hadn't purged the entire staff they wouldn't need to relearn the same lessons
nitwit005 4y ago
> No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense. It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.

recuter 4y ago

I take it no such outages occurred in the prior history of twitter?

input_sh 4y ago
16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific. Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.
- recuter 4y ago
  Well, RIP twitter I guess. Although strangely if I search the news archives for outages with date set to before 2022..
  - input_sh 4y ago
    You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging! I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality. Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!
    - recuter 4y ago
      > I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016 Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-down-over-web-and-mobile#comments https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d... Amusing comments over there from readers. You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.
      - input_sh 4y ago
        How is that against what I said? I said no outage lasted over an hour since 2016 and you disprove that by posting a 2016 article of an outage that lasted maybe two hours? (I don't know, the article doesn't specify.) Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.

rvz 4y ago

[flagged]

input_sh 4y ago
No, they happened. They didn't last a double digit number of hours though. Not gonna say in decades, but in the past decade for sure.
hnbad 4y ago
Nobody said "absolutely no outages happened [..] for decades" and the fact that they did doesn't refute what you're replying to. You're not being downvoted for not being irrationally angry at Musk. You're being downvoted for being disingenuous in a very obvious way and then pretending the downvotes prove you right.
KyeRussell 4y ago
I feel that my downvote won’t accurately express my dislike of this comment, so to provide a further explanation: you’re making absolutely zero effort to engage with this conversation. You’ve completely fabricated a point of view to oppose. Nobody here can be construed as being on the opposing side of “things have downtime sometimes”. I’ve every right to believe that you’re an Elon Musk fanboy because your reaction seems incredibly emotionally driven.
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  If anything is emotionally driven, it's your reply. I am also interested to know if outages happened before or is a recent phenomenon. I don't have a stake for electric car space man, or furiously despise him for god knows what as per above.
wpietri 4y ago
> simple question really shows the irrationality and emotive reaction about anything Twitter because of Elon Musk I think you're right here, just not in the way you intended. Because this is not a reasonable standard to use: > So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over in the past decade then?

manholio 4y ago

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business? After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it. The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale. The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content. By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.

invalidname 4y ago
At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff. But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on. Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...
- 0898 4y ago
  > “At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple“ Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.

philliphaydon 4y ago

Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter? And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?

highwaylights 4y ago
Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most. A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it. Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get. You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly. Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. This is dire for him.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening. As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages. So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that. Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase. I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.

actualwitch 4y ago
Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.

14 4y ago

Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.