Twitter Problems? | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Problems?

93 pointsstygiansonic59 comments

Can’t seem to load threads on the official mobile client. Others report issues as well: https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/

Would be ironic if it was cache related in light of this post yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30295542

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There was a @paulg tweet saying that if there are multiple explanations for an event, choose the most boring one. Very much agree

edit: found it on Twitter search thanks to another comment

> Between two possible explanations for an event, prefer the more boring one.

Which is known as "Occam's Razor" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor), often said in this manner:

> when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.

A theory which origins can be traced as far back as ~1300.

If things had been different it could have been called "Occam's Tweet"

Seems like lately we've gone from "when you hear hoofbeats behind you, don't expect to see a zebra" to "if you see a horse, it's definitely a centaur."

Interestingly, if you go on the search page and search something, it shows the post just fine, even if you click on it. But if you then reload the page, it doesn't work

https://twitter.com/search

Some people are able to post. Seems like third party stuff through the API though.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23twitter&src=typed_query&f=li...

Crazy thought: if there was to be a major event (say a Russian invasion of Ukraine) would taking down Twitter, which seems to have a high proportion of journalists and politicians on it, not be a smart move? The few hours of confusion it would buy might be valuable.

It’s most likely just a run-of-the-mill outage, but the thought crossed my mind.

I’ve heard crazier ideas.

I'm not seeing the value. Basically foreign civilians would be a couple of hours late to know about a foreign war?

Meanwhile pissing a lot of people off, turning more against them and making it harder for their own propagandists. Seems like a net negative.

Occam's razor says it's the same thing it's always been: a bad release or a capacity problem.

I am more worried about US/Canada border

Why?

Some truckers are blocking bridges. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/10/americas/canada-trucker-prote...

How would that take down Twitter?

How is Russia invading Ukraine would take down Twitter? Does Twitter keep their DCs in Luhansk? I was speaking in context of significant ongoing global developments

It would create widespread confusion in at least two of its principal rivals, the UK and US, and slow their ability to react.

Twitter's popularity in many places isn't nearly the same as in the anglo-speaking world, though I don't know the stats for the countries in your example. I'd say if internet access just got spotty in those areas, that would certainly benefit any kind of panic that might happen.

It's interesting there hasn't been so much as a peep about the Russia/Ukraine situation on here. I wonder why.

I remember back in 2014, just before annexing Crimea, Russian operatives managed to shut off the power to the Ukrainian army's headquarters in Crimea, leading to a lot of confusion and inability to communicate (they had to use mobile phones). I think what's more likely, and more useful, is to somehow isolate Ukraine itself from the rest of the world (instead of just Twitter), so that the news of the invasion could not spread outside. Although in either case you still can't do much about satellite images.

you would need to take down also Whatsapp, Facebook and telegram as well, though people could still exchange emails

Also seeing it here in Japan and has been reported by my coworkers across multiple continents. The twitter.com site is also broken; not accepting cookied sessions nor logins.

Also experiencing issues. Weirdly on mobile I'm still getting like/RT/reply notifications but I can't actually open and load the tweet I'm getting notifications on.

Edit: What's weird/unexpected is I just got a "twitter is better on the app" popup...ON the app? I'm not even sure how that would be possible, does the twitter webapp/mobile app share that much code?

Yep, it is down for some users. https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/11/twitter-is-down-2/

Twitter is so weird. They have a big technical staff but they never, ever launch features, leading people to believe all the work is being done on reliability and efficiency on the backend, but at the same time they have total outages regularly and don't turn profits.

> never, ever launch features

They launch features all the time: the new UI, longer tweets, reply hiding, moderating who can reply, spaces, etc. It's a long list.

Longer tweets was launched five years ago.

They've recently launched a Clubhouse clone and monetisation features

Yes and it's been a constant stream of feature drops since.

NE U.S. here, cannot reproduce any of this at all. App and browser are fine, cleared cache and cookies, can still log in, search, everything. A regular quantity of new tweets keep appearing.

Maybe us-east-1 is the region that stays up this time for a change...

Visiting Twitter.com on my desktop shows an error page and refreshes the page every second or so. Definitely seems to be something on their end.

Having the client make a request every second is a sure way of staying down in case of overload

I wonder if connected to LostArk deployment problems

Sounds like a great opportunity to not use Twitter.

web is not working, login is not working, lists are not working, cant send/reply. mobile feed works and shows only old tweets

This is why centralized platforms are a bad idea. In case of an outage people have no idea what to do other than panic.

There are vanishingly few people for whom Twitter being down for a couple of hours induces panic.

You should look at the comments.

They're overwhelmingly casual, and "people who actively comment on downdetector.com" seems to fit solidly inside the definition of "vanishingly few".

while I agree that's why I have also accounts on other Twitter alternatives

It was down and it keep erroring. I logged out and log back in. Now all good for me. I am in Cologne, Germany.

Amazon's f2p game Lost Ark was supposed to launch 90 mins ago but they delayed it, most likely related

Seems it got delayed because of deployment issues: https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/launch-updat...

> Due to deployment issues the Lost Ark launch is unfortunately delayed. We hope to have this resolved in a matter of hours, and we appreciate your patience. [...]

Off-topic, but what a bland and generic MMORPG. Is there any unique selling point for the game at all?

>Is there any unique selling point for the game at all?

Fluid combat + isometric view. Basically plays like Diablo/POE but without the loot bloat (instead you get the random gear progression). And the underlying mechanics are akin to any other theme park MMO.

Tbh it's a pretty fun game as long as you don't care about competing for the top spots with the pay-to-progress elements

Yep, was logged out of some accounts and able to log back in on the web, but no timeline is loading.

My mobile works, but I can't get anything at all to work on web

I can read and like tweets, but can't send new ones.

Internet Snow Day!

Yes can confirm from the Netherlands

Unable to login to twitter just now.

Well, my productivity just went up.

yes, can't send tweets.

Confirm.

Must be a Friday deploy.

Down here too.

Down for me

Same here

yes

> Can’t seem to load threads

Threads should never have been a thing, so maybe people now start writing articles instead on their own platform.

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