Before, it was "healthy for everyone" when Twitter went down (search hn.algolia.com for pre-Elon Twitter downtime threads)
Now it's an episode of Real Housewives just like any other Elon thread on HN.
I'm probably not the ideal person to write this down, there was so much stuff going on, some people probably made a whole blog-article series on this. This is just a few of the things that I'm able to remember right now.. and with everything on hn here it gives you some ideas and things to think about. Hope that Helps.
... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.
The only cases I can think of for staying:
- Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!)
- A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck to paycheck, haven't interviewed in awhile, imposter syndrome... (If you're worried you'd not be able to get hired, instead ask why you weren't fired.)
Seems to be related to a query param in my case (if I remove the ?lang=en, the page loads properly).
* Not to mention the SSL certificate appears to be expired too.
———-
EDIT-01: Appears there’s a status page just for the API:
EDIT-02: Wow, Twitter is using Twitter to post status updates:
- https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/163279294226274713...
Love that detail. Just the icing on the top that says "everybody who was vaguely aware of this particular infrastructure is gone."
(Assuming this is more of a the site’s not down unless the CTO says it is services.)
How odd.
"Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed."
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/163279294226274713...
I remain astounded by how much their product has declined (even pre-Musk acquisition) from their glory days of being so light weight that they were used to organize protests when governments would clamp down on internet access.
Maybe fetching through the API is working better?
I assume they do it that way to get around all the rate limiting and threat of having access revoked that the official API comes with.
This person missed their calling at the State Department.
1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/twitter-lays-off-...
> But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
https://www.platformer.news/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-...
We felt bad for the engineers that are still there, and were actually surprised it's stayed up this long, with all the knowledge that walked out the door. Basic stuff like "where are our servers actually located".
I guess the folks that left loved Twitter enough to leave behind good notes, because even the most well architected systems still need some institutional knowledge when they go down.
It appears that when Twitter goes down, its engineers were indispensable but when it's up, it's because the engineers foresaw this.
Given those factors, how long it stays up must be an interesting combination of how indispensable the engineers made themselves vs how much foresight they had.
But at the scale and complexity, eventually you hit an unforeseen error that requires some institutional knowledge to fix, and it's doubtful they still have that, unless the ex-engineers loved the product so much they are willing to take phone calls from the people that are left and point them in the right direction.
I don't think we landed on a time frame. I'm actually surprised it stayed up this long.
The truth is, they often do. Especially when there are changes happening. I once took a week off and we went down on day 2. Other times, I'm convinced I could've gone 6 months without anything breaking.
At Twitter's scale, I'm sure there are systems where everything is automated and self-healing. But there are probably other systems that are more fragile. And then there's the eternal race against scale; eventually a system with no maintenance will get buried under the weight of its own data or the scope of its usage. That always requires some work.
[0] e.g. Elon: https://twitter.com/elonmusk
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1632574090216103937
I guess there's still one aspect of the company that Musk hasn't "fixed" yet...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-ho...
But there's one more gotcha, a company can't just keep 10% - 40% and expect the service to still run, because it's rotating and oncalls can always reach out to other people on the team.
Twitter not only fired indiscriminately, with perverse pattern (more capable to find another job leave first), and didn't even keep the minimum to keep the lights on.
From a software engineering perspective, it's doomed to fail, maybe it can retract to a smaller footprint (abandoning features/stacks) and still work, but that would also be pretty hard. That, and I don't think anyone not desperate will apply for a job there in the foreseeable future.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1632788892599586816
> The Twitter outage seems to be around a critical piece of infrastructure: the Twitter link shortener.
> Every link on Twitter has been shortened to a t.co link. Only Twitter’s systems know where the link goes
> If these systems ever go down, its link rot at scale
Only if one's mental model is that t.co links were ever permanent.
They're privately-owned obfuscator links. Unless someone in the wild was building a mirror mapping, they were always doomed and never to be trusted; they knocked the "U" right out of the "URL."
Just a steady degradation of service.
Lots of people were waiting with baited breath for Twitter to fail the first week Musk bought it, but most of the failure conditions had been automated away...
Instead the reliability loss creep happened more slowly. The people that understood the edge conditions in the system were fired. Then new changes need implemented and the old, now not understood systems, were ripped out and new pieces put in. And lo and behold they have tons of failure conditions and edge cases that can knock out the system.
Even if your programming team wrote immaculate documentation on all these edge conditions, it can take an immense amount of time to both read them, and then fully understand them, and when you have a micromanager breathing down your neck for changes 10 minutes ago this is what happens.
I don't spend enough time on Reddit for that to really resonate, but the badges and icons flying all over the place and talk of Twitter Gold (or whatever they're calling it) do feel very Reddit-esque these days.
I barely use the app anymore and half the time stuff isn't loading at all or is broken in obvious, overt ways.
Just ... stunning.
I use the app for a couple hours a day (according to my iPhone weekly reports), and have barely noticed any degradation since "the takeover". (Notwithstanding the obvious outage happening currently).
There's been a few minor glitches for sure, but then what large service is immune? Facebook, Exchange, AWS, etc. have all had notable outages this past year, and the Apple Services I regularly use (Apple Music, Siri, etc.) "fail" more often for me in daily use.
Maybe you're trying to do something more advanced than me, or are using a less reliable platform somehow, but generally I find all the "Twitter is so dead" talk being confirmation bias from folks that really want it to fail in light of recent changes.
In my ideal world, Twitter - or something similar - succeeds. I don't care much about the politics of the ownership because that's generally going to be an iffy subject with anything coming from the valley.
But to regularly use it and not see things breaking here and there every day (not even including the times when the API is borked or it's only recommending Elon Tweets in your feed or a person's timeline won't load no matter what, not being able to send a tweet, etc.) ... I have to imagine you're very lucky. There was about 11 hours when people had exceeded their daily tweet quota by trying to send a single tweet. You don't remember stuff like that? It happens multiple times a week in the last few months.
I'm certainly not doing anything advanced. I'm mostly a casual user.
Hiring for twitter is going to be quite expensive, nobody is taking this up without huge payoff and probably upfront given Elon pre disposition not to honor severance etc
Like.. wokeness was annoying but the trash heap of craziness it is today is 5 steps backward. My feed is nothing but conspiratorial nonsense.
If twitter was “tilted left” before, today it seems to have capsized rightward.
I honestly can't believe that not only did he welcome back actual Nazis that were previously banned, but he sold them checkmarks that let them have outsized influence.
I still don't understand why every fifth post in my feed is an Elon tweet, I don't even follow him. I could block him but I find it interesting to see how much of his content is pushed toward me who hasn't asked for it.
I'm not a delicate flower when it comes to offense so I'd just roll my eyes when the first two kinds of tweets popped up. But seeing a grown man repeatedly trying and failing so hard at being a poster is a bit much to take.
Given all the random things Elon has cut from Twitter, it wouldn't surprise me if that included a staging environment.
1. The site would crash and burn the next day.
2. Nothing would change. All those engineers were anyways just sitting around.
3. There would be no immediate impact (servers can run by themselves after all), but the site would slowly degrade over time as institutional knowledge around maintenance, upkeep and all the various system quirks was gone.
We are now seeing #3 play out in front of us.
#2 is what hardcore Elon fans said.
#3 was always the most likely prediction and is what any actual tech engineer should have said.
- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...
There's a great 2015 essay by Peter Seibel who was tech lead on their Engineering Effectiveness team:
https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers
I'd guess almost nobody from that era remains at Musk-Twitter.
The fact that things start to fail after that infrastructure has been put on place and running find for a while is noteworthy.
Maybe it's because I use an Android, but I've always found the experience terrible. I get notifications, but when I click them and they don't take me anywhere; the back button is completely broken; mentions randomly don't produce any alerts; it resets me to the algorithmic timeline every few days; replies often fail to load; the spam problem is completely out of control and most adverts are irrelevant crypto-spam; search never finds what I wanted; it's constantly putting tweets on my timeline from people I don't follow; and the whole app seems optimised to produce as much hatred and outrage as possible. Nowhere on the planet is as toxic as a Twitter thread, and yet the media and political sphere collectively decided that reporting on and catering to Twitter spats is the most important aspect of their career.
Frankly, if Musk destroys Twitter, it might be the best thing he could do for society. I may be misremembering, but I thought that prior to Musk buying Twitter, everyone was decrying it as toxic and lots of people were suggesting the government should step in to reduce its influence. Now it seems to be imploding by itself, yet everyone's upset.
Well we're not even a year in and these "small issues" seem to be repeatedly occurring. Let's get a little further out with some more stability before we call them justifiable lol
What you're describing is the loss of institutional knowledge with a fantasy tacked on the side.
1) There's no reason to expect those employees would come back, even at rates far higher than Musk is likely willing to pay. Everything indicates Musk has destroyed a lot of goodwill with his shambolic layoffs, and getting people to come back is one of the situations where you need goodwill.
You're basically talking about gig-work on a shitty boss's terms. Only desperate people would play that game, and the people Musk would need probably aren't the desperate ones.
2) Any employees that come back are going to be rusty and lack the institutional of what happened after they left, so their effectiveness at immediate fire-fighting will be greatly reduced.
3) If there's a "massive catastrophe" at Twitter, do you think they even know who to call back? I wouldn't be surprised if they've lost a lot of the institutional knowledge about who knew what, at this point.
I'm sure there are some people who would do that, but those opportunities become very expensive-to-impossible when you burn bridges the way certain new management has. People hold personal value on things like respect and principle that can make them behave "irrationally" in naive analyses like this.
Not by bringing people in during a fire and pointing into the smoke and saying "fix that!"
Elon Musk has a rock-solid reputation of paying his bills, after all.
It's possible Twitter didn't need to be spending all the money they were to be maintaining five nines or whatever, given the shift in product focus (humans and not a general/universal message bus - bots can't @-mention anymore, etc).
Given that they are unprofitable, if I were a shareholder I would be upset if I did not see experiments being run to see how much cost can be cut and where. I doubt people will abandon the platform en masse over a few minutes of downtime here and there. They will lose 100% of users and be down forever if they don't stop the bleeding, however.
Twitter will never get to $44bn market cap again (much less a valuation with a decent IRR) by cutting costs alone. They need to grow way more than they need to cut costs.
If any of those experiments lead to less growth (which I’d argue is true of a broken Tweetdeck), then they are wholly not worth it.
... wait, they absolutely were, though? I remember at the time people saying that Twitter was doomed for this very reason, by analogy to Friendster, an early MySpace-ish/Facebook-ish thing which was never able to stay up.
It was a pretty common belief at the time that unreliable Twitter would be replaced by Pownce/Google Buzz/something entirely different.
It could be because Twitter was ascendant at the time as you described.
And this thing he was complaining about back in May, he completely f'd it up post-purchase:
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-fix-twitter-feed-elon-musk/
A revenue collapse of 40% with a surge in fake verified profiles does not make Twitter better than ever. It is crazy to see a sudden sharp 40% revenue decline being described as better than ever.
Just top 3 Mastodon instances(mastodon.social, pawoo.net, mstdn.jp) collectively has > 2mil users, same level as Twitter in 2008. Misskey, an ActivityPub/Mastodon compatible server software, now has >10K users. Nostr isn't much, Bluesky is still invite only and had just went past 2k registered, but those are all available options for direct substitutes to Twitter in case anyone still in need of a legacy twitterform social media.
You really think 'pawoo.net' and 'mstdn.jp' are fabulous advertisements for Mastodon of over 2M users on those instances, unless you think CP and loli culture there is a great thing since it is totally illegal in hundreds of countries?
Secondly, both pawoo.net and mstdn.jp instances are owned by a single company called Mask Network [0], which essentially means it is not community owned and is under central control of a company that can do whatever it pleases, even if the users on the platform dislike it.
Finally you missed out another large Mastodon instance after mastodon.social which is braag.et which promotes CP and illegal content. So it seems that the instances with the larger amount of users also allows CP and illegal garbage on it.
It's quite hilarious to believe that Mastodon with these examples remotely has a chance against Twitter as an alternative.
[0] https://masknetwork.medium.com/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-n...
Yes.
My understanding at this point is that, firstly, instances that do not federate with these, and those cheap “CP” accusations, has no relevance in this discussion, because nothing comes out of those.
Secondly, it seems completely plausible to me at this time, that a central Mastodon instance will become the core of a Western European social media landscape, in the way this wartime Russian Federation maintains VKontakte, or that Communist China maintains Sina Weibo. And Misskey could be another such for another region, each contributing to slow segregation of the Internet at religious-social-political interfaces.
Such violent responses that you have expressed against the names of .jp and Pawoo is plausibly an indication of those developments.
I'd never used tweetdeck prior to now. Yet, it just now loaded fine for me. Once it loaded, I clicked a button that said something like, "setup some fields", and then tweets were displayed. What's not working? I'm just a free user of twitter.
Or... it was broken for normal users and is now fixed.
The newspaper said there was a fire at this building? Yet, it looks fine to me now?
"Disable them and see what happens."
Obviously, that's paranoid thinking. But the results are the same in many cases.
A market for lemons developing. A reinforcement of the strategy for others. And more stressful things in our lives.
If people are resentful, I understand. I hope they can find peaceful communities and safety wherever they go. I'm sure there will be political or technical reforms to accomplish that.
I hope people remember in the end that there were beautiful and good people in different spaces on the Internet, including Twitter.
I hope I can choose my own story.
Good to know that I can rely on H/N to tell me what's really going on... and it's not "just me".
One reason the site was stable pre-Musk is that no one made any changes to it. For better or worse, it's now owned by someone who actually uses the product and has ideas for how to develop it.
From a business perspective does it matter that Twitter is down for a moment? It's not a plane or medical machine. It's not blocking anyone from doing anything useful. Everyone are just going to check & post when it is up again.
It also doesn't mean that Twitter employees have a bad work experience like most here assume. Maybe they've got a permission to iterate fast, even if it risks bringing things down, and everyone are having a jolly good time, skipping on the boring chores ensuring everything will go smoothly usually takes.
Is down too, at this moment.
What a colossal piece of shit. Everything there is information-free and radicalized. The only maybe useful thing is the result of some game, that I assume it's soccer. (But British soccer, why would I care about British soccer? The rest of the page is localized into Brazil.)
Looks like it's already being/has been fixed. Still, pretty impressive level of brokenness for a short time.
help.twitter.com, api.twitter.com, developer.twitter.com etc.
Before it is all '#hugops' and 'best wishes to the engineers at Twitter' when it had downtime before the acquisition. But as you can see, they all love to hate it because a person called Elon R. Musk owns the blue bird site.
Just like when everyone here thought that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp all collapsed and went down for hours it was declared as the 'end of times' the 'death of Meta', etc, with it's network effect still unaffected by that.
The same thing is happening for Twitter as even when it goes down, it's network effect of 220M+ users is still sitting there waiting for it to get back up.
for reference: I see absolutely none of the things anybody is saying they are seeing as errors. Twitter works exactly as it ever has for me.
The latter is a kind of anecdotal evidence that does have no value in discussions like this. The linked post is from the official Twitter account stating that things are broken and it is for many people. If you don't see it this could be due to many conditions on why it might seem working on your device/client/account. This does not lead to any logical conclusion that these information might be wrong.
At Twitter's scale with the number of API users they had, I can't imagine how they'd filter the signal out of the noise.
This is very much a "someone would have had to know we're using our own API to avoid this disaster" scenario, which is an institutional knowledge problem. The kind of problem that gets hard to solve when XX% of your workforce suddenly left to seek new opportunities.
0 engineers to prevent this from happening
I can access it from my mobile browser.
Farewell?
https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/101855884867059302...
This is "Elon Musk is deliberately mandating bad software engineering practices". I will decline to speculate whether that is out of malice or incompetence.
I won't argue that firing all the engineers so swiftly wasn't a mistake (I mean I _could_, but don't want to dig myself any deeper than necessary in a single post). What I will say though, is that this gives me hints as to the quality of engineering that went on at Twitter.
I feel like some stellar Rube Goldberging went into solving problems that could have used simpler, if not _less CV boosting_, solutions. I've been at places like this. The engineers have fun building convoluted "solutions" for the sake of saying they worked on cool-tech-x. And surprise, it needs endless maintenance.
