X: All Tweets Disappeared | Hacker News Reader

X: All Tweets Disappeared

twitter.com

21 pointsgreenSunglass21 comments

This is the 3rd time I've seen a topic on this subject. Need to start merging IMO:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717326

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38717367

Or just flag them. HN is a lousier downforeveryoneorjustme than downforeveryoneorjusme. And the threads go stale pretty fast.

It was a partial outage. It looks like core features were truly down, but various down-detectors we're reporting that Twitter was still up.

The perennial problem of shallow monitoring checks; let's call them "Layer 5", vs. specific checks, let's call them "Layer 7".

Yeah I logged in for the first time in like a year and it seems nothing is there, thought my account was glitching..

It’s been down for an hour, I think.

It was like good old Twitter. New account usually lasted for week, and then it was locked. I was banned mostly because of Russophobia. Twitter did not like one particular picture from Winter War.

Dramatic headline for an outage.

Working now

I’m not surprised to see Twitter’s reliability get progressively worse.

Overall, I think they could have reduced engineering staff in the long term by adopting mainstream open source technologies instead of their own custom (albeit also oss) database/filesystem/streaming system/rpc library/spark stack.

But those migrations would have taken years. Instead, slashing staff that fast is likely to cause slow rot of their ad network, and overall system resiliency.

I'm surprised Twitter is functional at all, at this point, considering how many people were laid off arbitrarily. The problem of arbitrary layoffs is vaporizing critical institutional knowledge and history necessary to support and extend particular internal services effectively.

Is it getting worse? This is the first outage I remember in a while.

There have been multiple "outages" over the last couple of months. They aren't consistent. Sometimes I reload several minutes later is fine, sometimes it is not, sometimes an immediate reload works. This one was showing no errors, just empty For you/Following streams. So a bigger outage. That said, it's degraded since Elmo took it over.

I don't know if it's getting worse, but it's not the first outage in a while. It's pretty common, but then again it always was.

loss of APIs far worse than site being broken for a few hours. Twitter has always had outages and glitches long before Musk.

> I’m not surprised to see Twitter’s reliability get progressively worse.

Can you share the graph of Twitter reliability over years that you plotted to arrive at this conclusion? Thanks.

You're seeing what you want to see.

Yes. There is the neutral reality and your projections of meaning to it.

You think Twitter / X is bad for reliability, then you haven't seen the frequency of GitHub outages for over 100M+ users for over 3 years and this is with having Microsoft's backing.

Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated with something breaking over there every week.

I have not seen anything else break more times than GitHub even having Microsoft footing the bill and they should have a much higher uptime than Twitter / X which eliminates any excuses over such frequent outages.

But it turns out that GitHub's reliability is far worse than Twitter / X.

> Yet somehow GitHub's outages are tolerated

This isn't exactly a hard concept to grasp though: it's entirely possible to use GitHub and still be productive when it's temporarily offline; Git doesn't stop working on your local machine because GitHub is down.

It's literally impossible to use Twitter when it's temporarily offline. There is no "offline" mode for Twitter.

There is also the argument to be made that (a) what GitHub does is orders of magnitude more complex than what Twitter does, and (b) I don't recall anyone buying a controlling stake in GitHub and then loudly declaring that it doesn't need all those staff and firing (IIRC) all but one of the Ops team.

The economics are different too. If Github is down, they're still 'making money' as long as their customers aren't so annoyed that they cancel.

Twitter needs to be serving ads to make money (primarily).

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