
Serious Twitter, LiveJournal Outage Ongoing - pclark
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/06/serious-twitter-outage-ongoing/
======
nick-dap
"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.

~~~
mixmax
That's how new markets are born.

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

~~~
nick-dap
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.

~~~
Elepsis
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.

~~~
nick-dap
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.

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

~~~
larrywright
It looks like it's actually Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal:
[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/06/serious-twitter-
outage-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/06/serious-twitter-outage-
ongoing/)

Somebody doesn't like social networks it seems :/

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

~~~
hyperbovine
If you're reading this they failed.

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

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

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

------
pclark
its going to be a productive afternoon without twitter.

~~~
rufo
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!)

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

~~~
kevindication
Remember: winners never quit, but quitters never lose.

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

Maybe this is more widespread than Twitter? Global cyberattack?

~~~
ratsbane
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.

------
vijayr
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

}

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

------
krschultz
<http://istwitterdown.com/>

~~~
utku_karatas2
Fail. Says "No".

~~~
krschultz
/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

------
cstefanovici
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???

~~~
gchucky
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.

------
wmblaettler
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.

------
figital
identi.ca is up

~~~
nir
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.

~~~
diego
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.

------
roc
federated protocol.

~~~
poutine
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.

~~~
mtw
that's the idea behind identi.ca

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

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

~~~
poutine
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.

------
jonursenbach
But whoever will they sue for the loss of revenue?

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

~~~
thamer
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>

------
noodle
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.

~~~
jrockway
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".

~~~
noodle
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.

~~~
figital
It made drudge about 15 minutes ago.

~~~
Jem
BBC are reporting it too.

------
ch101
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>

~~~
ch101
Why am I down-modded for this it was neutral?

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

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

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

------
scientifics
Twitter is back for me at 11:07 EST

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

