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Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down
- mopoke 14y agoLooks like a DNS failure, so adding 199.59.148.12 to your hosts file gives you working t.co links again.
- generj 14y agoI'm sure someone is having an interesting conversation right now. Twitter needs to stop having these embarrassing down-ages if they want to be a permanent player in the tech field.
- beagle3 14y agoThey've had them all along. Didn't stop them from getting to where they are. Why should they start caring now? From a cost/benefit perspective, it is probably not worth it to them to do whatever is needed to have a six nines uptime.
- x5315 14y agoWe care. We're working on it.
- dylanhassinger 14y agoAppreciate the responsiveness. But forcing us to use your link shortener does not send a message of "we care"
- x5315 14y agoWhat I meant was that we care about uptime, and we're working on improving that.
- paulgb 14y agoThey had so much downtime in the early days that their 500 page became a meme http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/ http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/
- jmathai 14y agoThankfully the Internet has a pretty short term memory.
- panacea 14y agoAnd nothing of value... /snark
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sedictor 14y ago; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> t.co ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 30304 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;t.co. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: co. 803 IN SOA ns1.cctld.co. hostmaster.neustar.biz. 2012499915 900 900 604800 86400 ;; Query time: 37 msec ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) ;; WHEN: Mon Oct 8 02:04:19 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 90
- dm8 14y agoI find my Twitter useless now (although I can still copy links). It's amazing to see how Twitter has become my information/discovery network. I use Facebook just to browse pictures and other casual stuff shared by my friends/family. Twitter can kill Flipboard and other tons of "discovery engines" with one flip. I think Twitter has figured out this stuff couple of years back and that's what they are doing. A real-time discovery network. It is more powerful than any of the existing old mediums, be it newspapers or TV networks. EDIT: It also makes extremely powerful advertising medium.
- sedictor 14y agosudo echo "199.59.148.12 t.co" >> /etc/hosts
- farms 14y agoIt's also listed in Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co - so it could be someone's filter going nuts over that. Funny recommendation there: "If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request." :)
- arcatek 14y agoWhen a HN twitter bot has tweeted this story, I actually clicked on the link. Genius.
- Mithrandir 14y agoSeems to be back up: https://t.co/uHJO6BCr https://t.co/uHJO6BCr
- mdonahoe 14y agoAm I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener? How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down? It's a centralized service, things happen.
- joebadmo 14y agoWhich is why we shouldn't use centralized services like Twitter. I'm rooting for http://tent.io/ http://tent.io/ myself.
- digitalengineer 14y agoHowever, if someone places a shortened url via tent you'd still not be able to click the link if the shorten-service is down.
- lloeki 14y ago> Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener? Yes. > How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down? This is different because if I read a tweet cached in my client or archived somewhere I can't reach an external resource because a middleman is down. > It's a centralized service, things happen. The WWW is decentralized by design. Link shorteners, and reliance on them, make it obnoxiously centralized. The tweet itself should contain the full link and shorten it only on display [0] [1]. [0] https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783814 https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783814 [1] https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783881 https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783881
- gjulianm 14y agoActually... https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-entities https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-entities The tweet response contains the full link.
- lloeki 14y agoInteresting. So, why is (apparently) everyone — including Twitter — sending us through t.co? Example here[0] where you can see Twitter displays "mlkshk.com/r/K29L.jpeg" in the tweet, downright lies to you when hovering over it with "http://mlkshk.com/r/K29L.jpeg http://mlkshk.com/r/K29L.jpeg while the real href is http://t.co/fqxnG84t http://t.co/fqxnG84t. So, WWW broken. [0] https://twitter.com/xkcdrss/status/255158017253838848 https://twitter.com/xkcdrss/status/255158017253838848
- mseebach 14y agoI can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?
- brian_cloutier 14y agoIf you're a regular user it's not exposed. Links are shown with their full url on the site and the user is usually redirected before tthey have a chance to notice they're being sent through t.co
- mseebach 14y agoIt is very much exposed: The regular user can't click on links on Twitter because it's down.
- justincormack 14y agoI am a regular user but mostly on mobile. Often I give up on links as it gets stuck loading t.co and I notice constantly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoBackwards compatibility.
- mseebach 14y agoIt could be as simple as a flag on the API: Do you want shortened links and a guarantee that the message is less than 140 characters, or full link, with a risk that it will "spill over". As most (all?) clients expand links anyway, they'd be choosing the latter.
- kcl 14y agoTwitter wants to route links through their servers for at least two reasons: 1. Analytics and monitoring. (Google's results page uses the same technique.) 2. Disabling malicious and unwanted links.
- avallark 14y agoIts surprising to see that thenextweb has written such a long article about t.co being down. i guess its easy to write up stuff :))
- stevewilhelm 14y agoFor most Twitter's users, it is not a mission critical service. It could be regularly down for hours at a time with little to no effect. They'll just come back later.
- chumpZero 14y agoI dont think its controlling satellites - its twitter...everybody chill
- jqueryin 14y agoInternal sources say t.co went down due to registrar error, which is highly unfortunate for Twitter as this was something out of their control.
- tomflack 14y agoRelated: OSX twitter integration seems broken for me? I can't tweet from Safari or other apps.