Serious Twitter, LiveJournal Outage Ongoing | Hacker News Reader

Serious Twitter, LiveJournal Outage Ongoing

techcrunch.com

77 pointspclark76 comments

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"these outages are much more serious. 45 million people worldwide now rely on Twitter as a communication platform"

Riiiight. Rely is a very strong word. How will we do business?! How will we talk to our friends and relatives?!

Let's face it, Twitter solved a problem that never existed.

That's how new markets are born.

Back in the day e-mail solved a problem that didn't exist too.

There was no way to transfer a document instantly and without using paper. Faxes were slow and used paper. There was a clear business need.

So I don't think thats a fair comparison. Then again I don't remember those days from personal experiences, just making an assumption.

From a different perspective. If it was serving a need people would be willing to pay for it.

When email was first becoming popular, most people didn't know they wanted to transfer a document without using paper. And in fact when they GOT a document in an email, much of the time they wound up printing it out.

But even then your basic argument is flawed, because it assumes that the point of email is attachments. The original technology email replaced was not the fax machine but the letter. Likewise, Twitter is arguably partly a replacement for SMS.

Thanks for the insight on email. I stand corrected.

However I still think that you can't compare Twitter to email. By now Twitter is widely accepted. And I still don't see how we would _rely_ on it for communication. Its a micro-blogging service, might as well call it "follow my random thoughts and I'll follow yours", which obviously works for a lot of people.

We should start treating it as a enterntainment tool and not as a fabric of modern society without which news would not propagate throughout this world. There is waaaay too much hype around Twitter. The day I saw CNN read random twitter feed is the day I died a little inside.

No, the point of email is not attachements or being paperless. It is the speed.

Uh, there was no clear business need. Businesses were fine with using fax machines and the telephone. If there was a clear business need, XEROX would have capitalized on it since they had some of the first networked PCs.

Before Twitter, there was no way to Tweet.

I've been in enough situations where direct messaging on Twitter has the best and most efficient means of communication to dismiss Twitter not serving a need. Yes, the utility of Twitter is almost always overblown by the media, but we shouldn't underestimate how many use it as part of their regular communication workflow.

Twitter is basically a phone book. Imagine loosing your address book on your iPhone or blackberry; you'd be lost. Direct messaging might be a great way to communicate with people, but that is mostly because that direct message then gets emailed and texted to the individual.

E-mail predates even the internet, it was obviously clear before people had terminals let alone computers on their desks that we needed means of electronic communication.

From Wikipedia: "E-mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating the Internet.

MIT first demonstrated the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961.[17] It allowed multiple users to log into the IBM 7094[18] from remote dial-up terminals, and to store files online on disk. This new ability encouraged users to share information in new ways. E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate. Although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS."

Unless your saying that E-mail wasn't solving a problem since we had the Electric telegraph so we didn't need anything better? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/443634

And as we know a lot of it has been blown out of proportions thanks to the potent mix of random "twats" and overeager traditional media.

As a tool it has its uses. However, I strongly believe that 45 million people don't _need_ this as a tool and use it purely for enterntainment. To say that we rely on Twitter for communication is simply false.

Also the 45m figure probably means 45m people have created an account at some point, tried it, thought it was ridiculous, and stopped using it. Daily users is probably far lower.

I was banned for using the word "twat" (modded down mercilessly even after I posted the full definition because I wasn't sufficiently humble about it).

Look up the account, sharkfish.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sharkfish

What is wrong with you people. Can't you see this poster is ruining the forum!?!? </sarcasm>

I up-modded you

You're gonna get punished for that. Someone is upset :)

You're already down to zero.

I have proven this site is full of um...let's not say. lol.

I see that I am.

I would argue it is for the market to decide what people need.

Sure it does. The problem is how to do public chat via your mobile phone. Of course, by now that's a footnote...

Twitter says that they are dealing with a DDoS attack. See http://status.twitter.com/

It looks like it's actually Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/06/serious-twitter-outage-...

Somebody doesn't like social networks it seems :/

Corporate America is just trying to get some productivity back. Hard economic times, dontchaknow.

Lulz™

If you're reading this they failed.

Apparently Facebook is seeing intermittent errors as well, down for a bunch of people. Do these people all share a datacenter?

Yup, I keep getting "Transport error (#1001) while retrieving data from endpoint" intermittently.

Well, I've been getting that error forever (possibly years now). Facebook's always been 98% for me. Just slightly off 100%.

Facebook chat showing connection errors and other peoples' photos are appearing in my mobile album. Of course, it could just be load from all the displaced twitter users.

Friendfeed is up :).

its going to be a productive afternoon without twitter.

Not if I keep checking it every two minutes to see if it's back up.

(I don't have a problem - I can quit any time I want!)

It's very easy to quit, I already quit hundreds of times before

Remember: winners never quit, but quitters never lose.

not for me; instead I'll be reading more on HN.

My site's down since about 5 minutes ago. It's on App Engine...

Maybe this is more widespread than Twitter? Global cyberattack?

Two people have called me in the last few minutes to ask if I'm having internet problems - on in Nashville on AT&T and the other in Memphis - not sure what carrier.

My Comcast connection just went down for about five minutes while I was typing that... but my open ssh connections, one to a server in Nashville, one to one in Fremont at Hurricane Electric, and one to Rackspace in Dallas - still worked.

if social networks are up {

spend time there

}

else {

keep checking if they are up, every two minutes.

worry and talk about why they are down

}

I started reading as if it were pseudo-code, but then realized it was English with a few extra curly braces.

http://istwitterdown.com/

Fail. Says "No".

/me smacks hand into forehead.

That is because Twitter is back - at least for some people. Before it was total blackout so it said Yes. This comment is from about 10am this morning

Can anyone comment on whether the issues with Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal are related? Nobody seems to be saying it, but it doesn't seem to be a coincidence? I know Twitter has had downtime before but this is of long duration, early in the morning and coinciding with issues with the other sites. Is this an anti-socialnetworking hacker attack???

They're probably not. Twitter is a DDoS according to its status page; whereas http://status.livejournal.org/ says that their problems were "due to some database problems."

No idea about Facebook.

I am not sure if it's related, but I had connection errors with Facebook chat last night around 11pm EST, it was my first time using this feature, so I wrote it off as buggy, and moved the conversation to another chat platform.

identi.ca is up

http://identi.ca/figital

Sorry that was spam (although joke spam). I've been clicking around on identi.ca for 10 minutes ... the navigation is really clunky ... I'd think delicious could handle the traffic and keep users if twitter went down (it's almost the same thing but with more features).

Is there a statistic on how many people use identi.ca? I wonder if it's reliability is due to better design or simply having less users.

Check out alexa, compete, etc. identi.ca would have to be horribly designed in order to run into scalability issues at the current traffic level. Twitter's traffic is two to three orders of magnitude greater.

70.000 users on just identi.ca, without counting others using laconi.ca

Soon it will be down because of all the twitter whining inside identi.ca

no one uses that

federated protocol.

That is indeed the solution. If a Twitter type service is to become a real communications platform it must be federated (decentralized) and immune to DOS attacks, government intervention, etc.

that's the idea behind identi.ca

I was thinking XMPP/Google Wave. Identi.ca will never win over the Twitter audience, something different may.

I thought the point of hacker news was to give an opportunity to small teams and startups, not just because it comes from google

I'm not giving any opportunity to anyone. The market will do what it does.

As a technology solution, XMPP is far better than a polling based Twitter/Identi.ca client.

I'm not giving any opportunity to anyone. The market will do what it does.

As a technology solution, XMPP is far better than a polling based Twitter/Identi.ca client.

Like http://identi.ca/ ?

But whoever will they sue for the loss of revenue?

summize has been working all along ... you can see some tweets occasionally going through during the attack.

The streaming API¹ worked for a bit, but just went down too. For a while it showed that a few tweets were still going through.

[1] http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation

you know, this would be a pretty sneaky way to measure the reach of twitter -- go down for an hour or so in the morning and take a look at the media response metrics.

TechCrunch will complain about anything and everything, regardless of its actual importance.

For example, Arrington's house doesn't have electricity this morning. Who cares? Nobody. And yet it is a critical part of this "story".

fair, but i was referring to more mainstream sources.

i'm not trying to imply that this is what is happening, but i do think it could be an interesting metric to compare -- how much noise you get from downtime 6 months ago to the noise of today.

It made drudge about 15 minutes ago.

BBC are reporting it too.

My twitter is down. I was going to ask all of you to add me to keep me updated, but I suppose that won't work. Add me later then http://twitter.com/colleenannhayes

Why am I down-modded for this it was neutral?

is there anything big/interesting enough going on today that someone would have a motivation to take out twitter's platform to obfuscate?

Will Twitter go out again after service is restored from everyone complaining about the downtime?

Twitter traffic levels as a sawtooth function generator. Hm. Wonder what kind of news it would take to produce a sine-wave ?

Twitter is back for me at 11:07 EST

http://status.twitter.com/ says it's back up too, although they are continuing to defend against the DoS attack.

Appears to be down again at 11:35 EST

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