In Twitter’s early days, only one celebrity could tweet at a time (2018)

theoutline.com

36 points·hliyan··23 comments

ah yes, the years when you would see the fail whale every other day.

i kind of miss the old twitter days -- less politics and more... fun?

I only go to Twitter through links from here or reddit and I still get error pages pretty often.

I’m convinced that it’s intentional to push sign up and reduce anonymous bandwidth

If you don’t login, it seems to be guaranteed you’ll initially get a “page couldn’t load error” on browser or app, until refreshing (sometimes multiple times).

At this point I’m assuming it’s intentional, since it occurs over multiple devices, browsers and probably years

I don't think it's 100% intentional. Twitter links were working pretty well from February through May this year; which unfortunately untrained me to not click twitter links.

The fail whale used to come out predictably 30 minutes into an outage where I was working (no coupling between the services, just users would tweet about us being down until Twitter fell over); but eventually Twitter was able to handle it, so we had to buckle down and fix our systems too.

Could only handle “two popular” users at once, requiring manual traffic control. Slowing Twitter down might be something to consider again.

Twitterāgō dēlenda est

I wonder with today's server / cloud resources, how far could Ruby Rails Scale on a twitter clone.

Could we bring that back, please?

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