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Comment by lukey_q | Hacker News Reader

A lot of high-profile outages recently. Can't actually remember the last time Twitter went fully down. Have to confess I immediately assumed an issue with my own connection, even though every other site is working.

Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head

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Twitter is especially weird for this since it's often a platform where people talk about downtimes. I don't see this downtime mentioned on Reddit and I don't know of other sites where it might be discussed, so if Hacker News happened to go down at the same time, where would I go to talk about it with online strangers and find out if it's just me? Nowhere, I guess, I'd just wait it out with no extra insights on what's going on. A small reminder of what the world used to be like haha.

reddit feels like it has about a 4 hour lag time on most "breaking" events.

This is the time it takes for news in major subreddits to gather enough votes on the "new" tab to make it to the main subreddit front page, then the actual front page.

Smaller subreddits seem to be less affected by this, which is why /r/toosoon (a subreddit dedicated to dark humor related to current events) is often surfaces news hours before other subs for people who have it in their subreddit list.

This gets pretty rowdy:

https://downdetector.com/status/twitter

For a simpler view of things, there's also https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com

I do love that this site still exists years later. I still use it regularly. It only took me like three years to remember the name right the first time.

it got brought up as quick as it did here

at least on r/twitter

You could use the outages mailing list

https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages

https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2019-July/012527.h...

Yesterday, Stripe went down for a half hour, and the later yesterday, Google's Android Payment Validation API went down for more than 2 hours.

Stripe at least acknowledged their downtime. Google was oblivious, made no update to any of their status pages. Really horrendous awareness and support from Google per usual.

Giving Amazon a run for their money I see.

Odd coincidence, seems like it might have been some upstream banks having a bad SCA rollout

> Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head

That phrase was coined by Harlan Ellison in his classic scifi short story to represent a situation of complete despair and powerlessness.

I don't think a lack of Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook or Gmail -- however inconvenient -- would fill me with that kind of existential dread :)

honestly i feel unmoored without tweetdeck on my second screen ticking by. i realise this is probably a bad thing, but getting my daily news and info, i'd say 90% comes from twitter.

I got rid of all of those except Gmail (need it for work, school, etc) and WhatsApp (only use for one group chat) and it is very freeing. I realized social media (Instagram especially) breeds unhappiness with your life, while all of the models and "influencers" on it don't live realistic lives. In fact I've experienced first had that their posts are often doctored or don't acctually portray the situation accurately.

Not those things specifically, but take a step back and look at the Rube Goldberg inspired complexity of modern technology and despair.

Mercury is in Retrograde through July 31.

I never notice problems when I don't know about that, so I wish I hadn't read that. :)

It makes me wonder if a powerful malicious agent can devise a complex operation (planting people in several key places) and wipe out most of the databases of one these places. It would be interesting to see what would it happen if suddenly all of twitter of facebook is deleted , puff!, gone in a second.

Actually deleting stuff at these scales takes many, many days if you don't want it to be trivially recoverable.

You can't delete that much data in a matter of seconds digitally. You need to physically harm the hardware.

Wipe the encryption key of your SSD, small amount of data to wipe, and the whole SSD is unrecoverable. FWIW at least OCZ SSDs have an encryption key flashed into it even if you didn't turn encryption on. Putting a new firmware on it can wipe this key and make your old data inaccessible. Source: got a buggy OCZ firmware that failed to make the device appear on the SATA bus, only way OCZ could fix it was to install new firmware which wiped the key and hence my data was unrecoverable.

Interesting point. I stand corrected. Not sure why I didn't think that way.

I recommend you watching Mr.Robot :)

I watched the first season but got tired of the constant morose attitude of the main character. Does it get better?

the mood of the character doesn't change. The plot is quite good though.

Move fast and break things

I think they are past that stage! If a 28 billion company gets to say that I am not going to feel bad about my site going down.

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