Twitter Experiences Widespread Outages | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Experiences Widespread Outages

variety.com

91 pointsapp4soft67 comments

Does the world seem a little brighter and happier to anyone else?

Just knowing that it's down makes me feel weirdly lighter.

There's something about just knowing of the existence of the perpetual rhetorical conflict on there that contributes a tiny amount of background chronic stress.

I can deal with the chronic rhetorical conflict; the bit that troubles me is that this is divisiveness and hate as a business strategy. It’s the deliberate product of much of Silicon Valley’s ingenuity if not also it’s ethos.

I don’t find Twitter more toxic than any other website. Much less so than reddit.

It’s mostly about who you follow I think. I heavily mute accounts that tweet any political/inflammatory rhetoric on either side.

Reddit front page is too political. I'm non-American so most of it isn't even relevant to me. I wish all social media had a "No Politics" button for the user to auto-hide all political posts.

> Reddit front page is too political.

Simple solution - just skip frontpage & go to bookmarked sub-reddit, for example /r/SpaceXLounge[0].

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/new

That's my favorite sub haha

It’s not just the front page. Reddit in itself is driving you to take side and fight for some justice. Methodically harmful.

I don't hear regularly about people's public reputations and careers being destroyed because of something posted on Reddit.

Sure, but twitter by nature is much more public. If you use your full legal name and decide to say something outrageous / attack people / etc, you can't be surprised if people take offense of it and report it in other medias.

Pretty much

If you keep it between friends and known moderate accounts it's ok but there are dark areas of hyper-polarized accounts, major A-holes, and major garbage.

Not really, I don't follow people that make me angry and specifically wanted to check on the latest updates of 2 projects at the time which I couldn't do as easily.

If it seems brighter to you now and you are not just meme-ing, I'd recommend changing who you follow.

If it is that difficult to check the updates, perhaps they need another mechanism for updating people...

I am not on Twitter and (whatever its undoubted positive potential) the overwhelming perception I have on it from various other media is negative.

Feeling brighter is a very fair reaction.

Twitter is where people say how offended they are.

Nah, still see too many low effort jokes on HN.

Twitter's experience is bimodal. If you follow politicians and celebrities and shillers, you will encounter extreme toxicity. If you follow technical people in non-management positions [1], you will have smart and intelligent conversations flowing into your feed every day.

[1] And ideally, whenever you see a politician on any side mentioned on your timeline, block their account and mute their name.

Twitter and reddit suffer from the same problem where even if you spend a lot of time curating your own niche following/subreddit list carefully crafted to avoid politics it's almost impossible to ignore other people's hot-takes or the feeds' headlines.

In the end I set up my own nitter instance for twitter and subscribed to some accounts' RSS feed.

For reddit the new layout is terrible and inserts headlines in between comments before you can read all comments. I use old.reddit with reddit enhancement suite and just use self-awareness techniques to remind myself to avoid going to the front page /all and make sure I'm logged in at all times so I only /home with my "boring" subs when I click on Snoo.

Muting words will go a long way towards removing hot takes. Every time you see a pattern of tweets on your timeline, just mute the key word. Having lots of false positives is worth it for having equally as many true positives. Of course, if twitter allowed arbitrary "regexp" to block content, that would fix most of the problem.

But you will never get the perfect timeline, but you can make it an overall positive experience.

Mute words are very useful, yes. You can also turn off retweets from individual users, which also can help cut down on noise.

Haven't logged in for years and attempted to since 2 hours ago but kept getting errors saying something went wrong on twitter's end. Me attempting to log in brought twitter down I guess.

Thank you, keep up the good work!

Twitter was originally good. It was and is a technology for following people you are interested in.

The corruption started because of the need to make money and how they chose to do it, namely advertising.

Advertising is brainwashing based on limbic hacking. The best limbic hacking is outrage.

Everything that you didn’t consciously choose to be in your feed is brainwashing. This includes promoted ads and trending. These approaches have gone through many optimization cycles and are much optimized.

Control over this brainwashing power is corrupting and @jack now wields it for his politics as well. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself.

The same techniques used in advertising are now used to inject political stances into your mind and heart. Also, @jack has used the power to not only to amplify opinions he favors but to silence those that he disfavors.

Same with Facebook. Same with crap journalism.

Junk food for the brain gets clicks. Just like sexy women got eyeballs on magazines, rage-bait gets clicks on links.

The big question is... how are we going to pay for the web without advertising? Nobody has been able to answer that question. The closest we seem to have is things like Patreon, and that doesn't cut it for big services.

Massive benefactors just like in the old days. Possibly crowdfunding. Would be interesting to see how far that can go.

The USA isn’t a utopian democracy. Never has been. It’s an oligarchy of power interests.

The Biden election represents tech’s full entry into the oligarchy. It did this by explicitly weighing in on the political battle.

Now that it’s hand is on the tiller, it can’t help itself and will keep its hand on the tiller.

Expect tech to weigh in on more and more issues of the country. Initially it was label itself as an erstwhile benign force, then beneficent, and then finally its mask will be unveiled.

Remember when big oil had so much power and wielded if? Now it’s big tech with so much power and it’s wielding it.

And yet my world just carried on as normal, even the high-tech, computer-centric parts. Almost as if twitter plays no meaningful role in any aspect of my being...

My Twitter app using their API doesn't seem to be impacted by the outage this time. It was the case earlier this morning and last night.

I hope they will post an article about what happened.

> My Twitter app using their API doesn't seem to be impacted by the outage this time.

Yeah, Nitter[0] also still working, so probably issue is somewhere in between frontend and API/database, but not in API/database itself.

Has not tested Twidere[1] & Cawbird[2], but just wont try it now myself to prevent any issues on my mobile/PC (NOTE: If you are not used those apps before you may not try to use it now, because it requires on time load of Twitter site to verify token — actually it may/would not work due to actual issue with Twitter frontend issue).

Also, seems like Twitter bots still can tweet (as all of them uses just a Twitter API, not a Twitter frontend), for example here is HNTweets just tweeted actual thread as it just reached HN frontpage.[3]

P.P.S. Here is previous dishonored HN top thread[4] on actual "Twitter Down" — it was really a bad idea to flag this Ask HN thread.[5]

UPD: Just checked Twidere — app able to tweet[6], so Twitter API is OK.

UPD2: Insider Paper tweeted[7]:

> Twitter says the data team is investigating system irregularity currently affecting all Twitter API v2 endpoints. In result, Twitter tweet feeds is still not loading for many users.

[0] https://nitter.fdn.fr/TwitterSupport/status/1383221595804602...

[1] https://nitter.fdn.fr/TwidereProject

[2] https://nitter.fdn.fr/CawbirdClient

[3] https://nitter.fdn.fr/HNTweets/status/1383404896930603017

[4] https://nitter.fdn.fr/HNTweets/status/1383216280992321546

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840441

[6] https://nitter.fdn.fr/app4soft/status/1383423370847342592

[7] https://nitter.fdn.fr/TheInsiderPaper/status/138341474877186...

I was able to browser for a while this morning, although I noticed one of my preferences had changed and it would not save. A few minutes later, it forcibly logged me out.

One of my bots [1] encountered an “Over capacity” (130) error while trying to send a tweet this morning, but that was all I noticed.

[1]: https://twitter.com/earthacrosstime

Yeah, mine got the same this morning too. Last night was terrible.

https://status.twitterstat.us/ is disappointing.

Like many others unfortunately.

I think their current status page is https://api.twitterstat.us/ actually.

Nice. Maybe they should keep it that way.

According to the status page, no issues in the last 180 days. But I can't login. https://status.twitterstat.us/pages/history/564314ae3309c22c...

Why the lack of transparency?

> No incidents in the last 180 days

Guess, there is issue in https://status.twitterstat.us itself - it parses Twitter API, and that is why there are NO issues (Twitter API is working even now!).

Companies have no incentive to keep their status page accurate. I mean look at AWS, its always green!

This is the homepage for me currently, any idea what's going on?

Edit: Extracted the image via the GET call, did Twitter's image hosting server get compromised?

https://imgur.com/a/fjWyIFH

> any idea what's going on? wtf

It's just down. Not sure you're going to get a detailed root-cause analysis right now.

> Extracted the image via the GET call, did Twitter's image hosting server get compromised?

What makes you leap to that conclusion? That's just their login page.

I had not seen it in years, I figured it was a generic blue background or something.

That's all I've ever seen it to have, too. Maybe a recent A/B test with a low experiment cohort % or something?

It's been like this for at least several months.

Wait, really? Not like I'm a heavy Twitter user, but I did have an account there I used daily a few years back, and another I made just a few days ago for a bit - thus, a recent visit to the login page. And I have never seen that glitchcore stuff before.

edit: Google Image Search doesn't seem to know much about it either, with only four results, all from Pinterest [1]. I'd expect a lot more hits, if it had been Twitter's login page background for as long as you seem to suggest here. Maybe I've misunderstood what you're saying?

[1] https://www.google.com/search?sa=G&hl=en&tbs=simg%3ACAQStgEJ...

It's their branding.

https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit

I haven't seen the homepage in years. Could very well be their new style.

That's just how it looks now. It has for a while.

Ah, okay! I had not seen it in years. Good to know

I've noticed no issues (iOS app on phone and tweetdeck.twitter.com on laptop).

Something that always puzzles me is the spite towards Twitter. It must be incredibly hard to avoid negativity in some circles/locales? My feed is generally very positive.

> I've noticed no issues (iOS app on phone and tweetdeck.twitter.com on laptop).

Yes, its expected for all apps (official & unofficial) which uses Twitter API directly.

Actual issue is NOT a Twitter API issue — it is highly likely Twitter site frontend issue instead.

More than frontend, I use Tweetbot and nothing works at all since last night. "over capacity" , etc.

Actually some Nitter instances able to parse Twitter API.[0]

[0] https://nitter.cc/app4soft/status/1383423370847342592#m

Twitter is somewhat back and seems to have reset settings like whether I want to see others' liked tweets. I very much do not, and yet here they are. Might be worth reinspcting your other settings.

This must be a configuration update that went wrong. I am sure of this because thats always the PR angle. Does anyone know what is really going on here?

I mean that's the genuine cause of most outages. People test code changes in multiple environments but make configuration changes on prod (assuming they even have a staging environment for their config, which is rarely).

Thats true! But thats sort of like saying there was an accident on the highway because 2 cars crashed. There are lots of ways a configuration change could disrupt service, all I am getting at in my previous comment was having even more transparency when stuff like this happens instead of boilerplate statements about config changes, is something I would appreciate and this would give me more confidence in the dev team as well.

They are reporting about it here https://api.twitterstat.us/

Yup, down.

For me it down just few minutes ago.

For curious reason, Nitter still can parse Twitter API (read-only).[0]

BTW, Android Central's provided a good tip, when there was "Twitter Down" on September 23, 2020[1]

> If you're impacted, your best bet is leaving things alone for a few hours and waiting for Twitter to fix their mistake; maybe go outside to enjoy the autumn air (weather on the East Coast is surprisingly nice today).

Just apply a hotfix: $ sed `s/autumn/spring/g`

[0] https://nitter.fdn.fr/twittersupport

[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/twitter-users-accidentally-li...

Down for me now, and reports on downdetector indicate also 12 hours ago. Scheduled workload gone amok?

It's a good opportunity to uninstall another social media app.

Twitter apps (official & unofficial) *probably* are not affected as Twitter API still working well... BTW, Join Mastodon!

(just reminds me story with "SourceForge <-> GitHub <-> GitLab")

Who cares, why is this news?

Hacker News is the fallback platform for discussion for a few communities like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.

(Or at least our slice of it)

> Hacker News is the fallback platform for discussio

But, for curious reason "Ask HN" thread on actual "Twitter Down" subj was dishonored and removed from frontpage, so many of us was left unnoticed in the next 12 hours.[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840441

I don't care about Twitter so much that I've come here to say it.

;-)

Imagine how much more peaceful, productive, and happy the world would be if this ended up being permanent.

An interesting metric I’d love would be: how many suicides per year could be stopped if twitter didn’t exist? I wonder if their is any number high enough to get them to stop what they’re doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com