6 ms·
Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. That's not necessarily true. People don't die when twitter is down, and
by frossie 14y ago
Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk.
That's not necessarily true. People don't die when twitter is down, and whatever twitter's business model actually is, I am not even sure there is a monetary penalty to them being down (unlike, say, Amazon being down which results in lost orders). They may have made the calculation that it was not cost effective engineering-wise to chase that extra 0.001% of reliability.
[Edit: Pedantry shield: Ok, ok, should have said people don't die because twitter is down. Obviously people are dying all the time, and some will indeed expire while twitter is down].
- InfinityX0 14y agoThey definitely lose money - their ad model is based on engagement, so if tweets aren't seen/can't be acted on, money is lost.
- walru 14y agoAdversely. Twitter being down causes a stir, which gets people talking even more. They quickly make up for the lost revenue as a result. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
- utunga 14y agoThis is going to lead to a loss of confidence amongst many - investors, advertisers, partners - who thought that Twitter was finally past its initial scaling/teething issues. It's not like there is anyone that hasn't heard of Twitter at this point in time. So yes, yes there can be bad publicity once something reaches the scale of twitter.
- re_todd 14y agoYou mean once you switch away from Rails, you don't automatically scale?
- kelnos 14y agoExtra reliability and redundancy costs money. More or less than money lost while the service is down? I of course can't answer that.
- dllthomas 14y ago> [Edit: Pedantry shield: Ok, ok, should have said people don't die because twitter is down. Obviously people are dying all the time, and some will indeed expire while twitter is down]. And here I was hoping we could just take down Twitter and live forever...
- Terretta 14y agoAn e-commerce site being down does not lead to exactly the amount of orders lost as is average for that time. Most people will try again later, with the possible exception of first time buyers and likely exceptin of impatient commodity buyers with alternative accounts.
- dennisgorelik 14y agoOn the other hand, even if many people buy, today downtime may cause users to change their long-term behavior and switch to competitors.
- andresmh 14y agoI would argue that people can die when Twitter goes down. In Mexico citizens are using Twitter to alert each other when Drug War violence erupts: readwriteweb.com/archives/shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_hashtag_narcocensorship.php
- kamjam 14y agoMaybe they need to tackle the underlying drug problem, rather than twitter fix it's downtime problem? The world revolved before twitter, and it will continue to revolve long afterwards.
- thenomad 14y agoI don't know the internal workings of Twitter, but if it isn't significantly easier to improve its downtime than to fix Mexico's drug violence, I'd argue they've made some non-trivial engineering mistakes somewhere.