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Twitter Completely Down
- Braasch 14y agoNot only is the website down, but it seems the entire API is as well.
- dreadsword 14y agoYep - stalling out big time. Good chance to test your error handling in a real world scenario!
- nulluk 14y agoHave just had to add timeouts to a few requests to the twitter API. Was completely hanging a whole site. Learn't something though, to never trust an API to respond in a reasonable amount of time!
- dreadsword 14y agoWords to live by!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mikecane 14y agoI'm not able to sign in. It happened when I tried to send a tweet from my blog while I was signed in. So, yeah, even the API is down.
- revorad 14y agohttp://mobile.twitter.com http://mobile.twitter.com is working.
- Braasch 14y agoIt'll load, but it won't allow you to sign in, Tweet, etc.
- mikecane 14y agoLooks like that just went down too, while I was using it! Edit: Nope. Just slow. My tweet appeared.
- m_pagliazzi 14y agofor me it works
- mikecane 14y agoWhat's up with the downvotes?
- timdorr 14y agoAs does SMS.
- thatusertwo 14y agoI can't tweet!
- th0ma5 14y agoMobile is back for me now
- aeurielesn 14y agoTwitter Status - http://status.twitter.com/ http://status.twitter.com/ No news at the status site either, that beats the purpose of having a dedicated status site.
- xabi 14y agoTwitter Site Issue 17 seconds ago Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.
- Argorak 14y agoMy favorite part is the Tweet-Button with zero tweets.
- tg3 14y agoIt has 56 tweets now...perhaps the outage is somewhat intermittent?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Deestan 14y ago"Users may be experiencing difficulties accessing Twitter"? Weasel words are so annoying and unnecessary. "Twitter is down." would do.
- mkr-hn 14y ago"Twitter is down" means something very different from "Some people are having trouble accessing Twitter." My own traceroute results during the outage pointed to network problems, and I saw people saying they could access it. It was unavailable to many people, not down.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
- jgrahamc 14y agox is down: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/x-is-down.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/x-is-down.html
- kristofferR 14y agoWell, it is newsworthy at least. Sure, being upset/getting angry just because of a little bit of Twitter downtime is stupid, but that doesn't take away from the fact that one of the biggest and most important discussion and communication channels the web has is completely down.
- jgrahamc 14y agoI don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.
- tg3 14y agoIf a large manufacturer had a fire in their facility, it would certainly be industry news. This seems like a similar situation.
- jgrahamc 14y agoThis is more like a large manufacturer having a power outage. A fire would destroy machinery or stock. Nothing's getting lost here, something's just unavailable.
- Karunamon 14y agoBut a large manufacturer having a power outage, for, an hour like we are here, would cause a great deal of trouble with anything downstream of that manufacturer. And I'd be willing to bet that industry sources, mailing lists, forums, (whatever the manufacturing equivalent of HN is) would be discussing the outage, how bad it is, how this is going to completely screw up profits, how irritated they are, etc, etc.
- zainny 14y agoNow how am I supposed to tell people that Twitter is down!?
- kristofferR 14y agoIt's sad, but my immediate instinct when I couldn't post a tweet was to try searching for other people having problems with Twitter - on Twitter.
- simondlr 14y agoSame. It gives credence to Jack Dorsey's claim of Twitter "holding the public conversation".
- SuperChihuahua 14y agoWheres the whale?
- cdooh 14y agoIt's down here in Kenya too
- circa 14y agoNot even a fail whale. bummer.
- rellik 14y agoWheels down @ Chicago O'Hare. Ping me if you wanna meet up while I'm in town
- gms7777 14y agoTwitter is down? Now where am I supposed to complain about twitter being down?
- mkr-hn 14y agohttps://plus.google.com/s/%23TwitterDown https://plus.google.com/s/%23TwitterDown
- peterwwillis 14y agoSounds like you just invented a new product: XIsDown.com, where not only do you get notified that X is down, you get to whine about it with other people.
- tikitaka 14y agothis still applies: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
- johnyzee 14y agoI hope they write up a post-mortem on the fallout (hopefully it won't be a post-mortem of Twitter). Those things are always extremely interesting with big infrastructure like this.
- dreadsword 14y agoIts been ages since Twitter has had one of its famous fail whale outages.
- pinko 14y agoNotably this outage lacks even a whale.
- darkstalker 14y agoThe birds finally dropped the whale
- CD1212 14y agoOne great thing about this for me: it exposed a bug in my app which relied on twitter being up.
- wtetzner 14y agoIf Twitter never went down, would it be a bug?
- MiguelHudnandez 14y agoI had a similar issue in one of my sites. It's an unnecessary dependency and should be corrected. Maybe not a bug, but a problem.
- MattRogish 14y agoI just ate lunch. It was sooo good! [Checked in to Shake Shack, NYC]
- leot 14y agoTwitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.
- derrida 14y agoFree it now!
- sp332 14y agoFree it? It's just 140-character blog platform and an SMS interface right? What's closed about it?
- k3n 14y agoConversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case. Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, but as I see it, Twitter is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill 4chan board. I still don't understand the draw, but then again, there's a lot of facets of modern society that I simply have no explanation for (reality tv?!?) and have been better off not worrying about it further.
- mikecane 14y agoPeople like to chat with other people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cb_simulator
- kristofferR 14y ago99,9% of people doesn't care at all about how technically innovative something is, they only care about how useful it is. And Twitter is incredibly useful.
- bithive123 14y ago"Incredibly useful" would imply that if you told me about Twitter, I wouldn't believe you. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it's not that hard to believe that someone invented IRC over HTTP and gave it a silly name.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mootothemax 14y agoAlways fun when you're developing against an API, and then have to perform a frantic investigation to work out if your latest code change broke everything... or it's just the API endpoint itself.
- zmoazeni 14y agoI had this problem years ago against the Twitter API. It took a shot of rum and a cigarette before I figured it out. And I'm not a smoker.
- ckdarby 14y agoThis is what unit testing is for
- DanielN 14y agoUnit test ( as already mentioned) and build up static json/xml/whatever files to run your code against so that you can integration test your stuff without integration testing the 3rd party stuff.
- Retric 14y agoAnd hope your static files still match the API behavior when your done...
- DanielN 14y agoAt some point you end up outside of the scope of testing, but you can build bootstraps to make sure that your mocks match whatever they are mocking. Obviously, this does you no good when something like an API service goes down, but that's issue is irrelevant to the question that was posed. Having some static file to test against whether it is accurate or not will instantly tell you whether it is your code or the third party that is breaking.
- timdorr 14y agoThat's actually a completely valid test to run: what happens when the API's results change on you? You should test that.
- larrys 14y agoIt's not down in when tried with an anon proxy service: https://proxify.eu https://proxify.eu
- yati 14y agoIf they decide not to hide it, some interesting news is on its way ;)
- voltagex_ 14y agoElaborate?
- steve8918 14y agoI think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recent outages of Heroku and EC2, and just like the financial crisis of 2008 which was laughably called a "16-sigma event", it seems pretty clear that the actual assessment of risk is pretty poor. The way that Heroku failed, where invalid data in a stream caused failure, and the way that EC2 failed, where a single misconfigured device caused widespread failure, just shows that the entire area of risk management is still in its infancy. My employer went down globally for an entire day because of an electrical grid problem, and the diesel generators didn't failover properly, because of a misconfiguration. You would think after decades that there would be a better analysis and higher-quality "best practices", but it still appears to be rather immature at this stage. Is this because the assessment of risk at a company is left to people that don't understand risk, and that there is an opportunity for "consultants" who understand this, kind of like security consultants?
- alex-g 14y agoThis is a great point, and this isn't just about Twitter but also about many other sites and services that seem to depend on it. It looks like a lot of people have created a distributed system version of dependency hell for themselves, where they rely on a multitude of third parties not to change behaviour or go down. Additionally, in many cases and perhaps perfectly legitimately from a cost-benefit perspective, the envisaged way to recover from this kind of problem is to assume that people can quickly and frantically hack their way out of it at short notice.
- sausagefeet 14y ago> I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Is this really a valid conclusion to come to at this point? I expect downtime in any service I operate. It's just how the world works. Does that mean I don't understand the risks and am misleading the board?
- debacle 14y agoSorry guys. I added twitter to my phone yesterday and tweeted twice. I didn't think it would break anything.
- larrys 14y agohttp://www.klonix.org/jun2012/twitter-20120621-125438.jpg http://www.klonix.org/jun2012/twitter-20120621-125438.jpg
- ghurlman 14y agohttps://mobile.twitter.com/ https://mobile.twitter.com/ is working just fine.
- sga 14y agoTrue. It's like a ghost town in there. #failwhale
- gruuk 14y agoAnd has a better UI than their normal version (to me, anyway). It's kinda cool that twitter has a fully functional backup site already online.
- pors 14y agoMaybe it's built only on top of the streaming API? https://dev.twitter.com/status https://dev.twitter.com/status
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoYou forgot the second part of the headline - "Twitter Completely Down, Productivity Surges"
- zbowling 14y agothe mobile site is still up. http://m.twitter.com/ http://m.twitter.com/ You can tweet and everything. The streaming API is also still partly up.
- mkr-hn 14y agoI'm glad this made it to the front page. Is the topic itself newsworthy? Not on its own. Is all the discussion that's flooding into this thread worth having? Yep. Even the subthread from the person complaining that this isn't newsworthy.
- qhoxie 14y agohttp://downscout.com/twitter.com http://downscout.com/twitter.com if anyone wants to track it.
- jason_slack 14y agoWow, Twitter is down, I guess I can get some work done today :-)
- moolcool 14y agoPeople are going to have to resort to [desperate measures](http://nedroid.com/2009/05/people-have-to-know/ http://nedroid.com/2009/05/people-have-to-know/).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Mojah 14y agoIf you're debugging webservices that suddenly slow down (timeouts of 10s), this may be your cause if they depend on s.twitter.com, search.twitter.com or api.twitter.com. As a workaround for those systems, add s.twitter.com, search.twitter.com and api.twitter.com in your /etc/hosts file that map back to 127.0.0.1. This obviously breaks Twitter integration, but it also makes sure page loads don't explode when waiting for remote resources.
- ntkachov 14y agoI like how on status.twitter.com they tell you you might have issues accessing the site. And then they give you a "tweet this" button.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- davidkellis 14y agoWhy is this on the HN front page? This is an entirely worthless post. It adds no value. Nobody is going to reread this at any point in the future. Utterly worthless.
- zupreme 14y agoI think that a lot of you guys are confusing "Disaster Recovery" with "Business Continuity". Disaster Recovery is a reactive approach. It's what you do to get things back up AFTER a system or site has failed. Business Continuity is a proactive approach. It's what you do to ensure that your critical services will remain viable whenever disaster occurs. In the cases of Heroku, Amazon, Twitter, and many more, their Disaster Recovery strategies have been successful. The fact that they came back online without major data loss is proof of that. Their business continuity strategies, however, have been found wanting.
- antirez 14y agoWe don't exactly know if the services troubles in this down times you cite were caused by a disaster, so maybe even the disaster recovery thing may be lacking.
- goronbjorn 14y agohttp://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-commercially-successful-web-applications-that-are-also-poorly-engineered/answer/Sean-Rose http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-commercially-successf...
- arunagarwal 14y agoWhere should I tweet... when twitter is down!!
- jwu59 14y agotwitter is up for me
- ThomPete 14y agoHmm it's up for me.
- mck- 14y agoIt's back up
- modarts 14y agoHow does a service who's sole purpose is to allow users to create and retrieve 140 character messages go down on such a frequent basis?
- jsilence 14y agoyes, "walled garden" is "single point of failure" spelled backwards.
- timf 14y ago"Today's turbulence explained" was just posted: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/todays-turbulence-explained.html http://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/todays-turbulence-explained.... Unfortunately there are no details, it just says "there was a cascading bug in one of our infrastructure components".
- teekarja 14y agoTwitter is down. The very fabric of modern life is endangered
- draftable 14y agoBut if Twitter is down, how can I tweet my complaints about Twitter being down?!?!?
- sakopov 14y agoMillions of people couldn't post a status update for hours. It's a terrible day on the internets.