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Comment by JorgeGT | Hacker News Reader

They erased this glorious status update:

> I fell asleep at my desk. In a dream, the ghost of a butterfly from the future whispered to me "the dollar hit 0 bitcoin". I wake up, people around me dabbing the blood from their eyes. Progress has been made but not enough. I crack my whip -- "we aren't getting to zero like this!". The flogging will continue until morale improves. Expect another update after I make my rounds. I'm sorry I've let you down. Jan 12, 03:11 UTC

But not before archive.org saved it for posterity: https://web.archive.org/web/20180112034351/https://status.kr...

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Guess in his dream BTC was over 33.5M and the butterfly was only using float16 precision...

Besides their tendency to create antipodal hurricanes, type safety is a major problem with butterflies.

It appears that we are at the mercy of mentally unstable amateurs.

You have to differentiate between the social media person and the actual engineers.

Considering some of the comments I wrote at three in the morning, I guess that the actual engineers had a quick break after the social media person went home.

Just because the social media guy likes to play social media'ish doesn't mean the rest of the team is like that.

But definitely not a good moment to make a joke.

Saying things like "ahead of the team passing out" in their latest status updates doesn't exactly give confidence that they have either good communications or engineering leadership.

If everyone has been up 24hrs then you will get status updates like that.

I guess it is all hands on deck and there isn't a large enough team to do rotations of shifts? Or the issue is very complex and you need all your best guys around to fix it.

Yikes.

As someone who runs a high availability website, I can feel for them, but it is really bad to be offline this long. I would look to make some changes to that team or address an unstaffing issue or something. This should not happen. This should have been preventable/foreseeable and a risk mitigation strategy could have been in place.

From what I suspect, we are talking about some backend issue that they are handling. Throughout my career I've never seen a "rotating shifts team" that can handle situations like this. It's usually one guy trying to fix it and a couple of others hanging in the office with a cup of coffee and giving advice on what should the company do next or being forced to update the status page.

The amount of downtime and how their wire has been for months says that

Based on the text-only homepage, I'd say the tech team is much worse - at least the social media guy is amusing.

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