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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I don't see "issue" as a weasel word, although I can see why he does. To me, it's just a general term that captures "problem" and "fault" and "bug". I don't think a lot of people read it and think to themselves, "oh, I thought there was a fault here, but it turns out it's just an issue". "Issue" is equally negative.

Bug trackers become "issue trackers" in part because people started to use them to track more than bugs.

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I think "issues" gain weasel points when combined with "may". It comes across as distancing yourself from whatever is going on.

The statement "Users may be having issues accessing Twitter" says to me that there may not be an issue, and if there is, it may be someone else's fault.

Speaking factually is the better course, IMO. "Some users are reporting problems accessing Twitter. Our engineering team is investigating the issue." No implications there.

People are used to hearing nonsense and discount everything you say once you start using it. I worked in a building where the building management tried to dress up a small fire as a drill by repeatedly declaring that all was well, even as a half dozen ladder trucks pulled up. Now a smoldering cigarette in a stairwell triggers building evacuations.

I always understood "may be having issues accessing Twitter" to simply mean Twitter is made up of large distributed services that rarely all go down. Instead service A in location C down might be down which means you might not be able to use the site in one of the many different ways you interact with it.

Yep, their wording now doesn't bother me much, but I find a lack of clear explanation after the fact particularly irksome (what was affected, where, why).

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