
Kraken Goes Down for 40 Hours, Drawing Mt. Gox Comparisons - yonilevy
http://fortune.com/2018/01/12/bitcoin-price-ripple-kraken-down/
======
hal9000xp
Latest Kraken update says that:

> We are still working to track down an elusive bug which is holding up
> launch. This bug did not appear in our many weeks of testing and only
> emerged in the production environment. Unfortunately, it is not consistently
> reproducible and we cannot launch until this issue is resolved.

Sounds pretty realistic to me. During my 8+ years of programming, I had a lot
of pain and sleepless nights trying to catch elusive bugs which can be
reproduced only in production servers and only sometimes. Many times, my
clueless managers got nervous and demanded estimated time from me.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to give realistic estimations. It could take
hours, days or weeks. Also, searching for such bugs doesn't scale well. It
means if you have 5 devs looking for elusive bug, it doesn't mean they will
find a bug 5 times faster.

~~~
koonsolo
I even had clueless managers who demanded I explained the technically complex
problem to them, because "maybe our insights could shed new light on the
problem". They just don't get that best thing to do is leave us alone and let
us do our job. They are just nervous because they are totally powerless in
such situation.

In a factory, a manager might be smarter than the one doing manual labour. In
tech, it's the other way around.

~~~
pdpi
Right idea, wrong reason. You have a tonne of assumptions about how the
product works that I don’t. If the bug is that subtle, dollars to Donuts says
that one of your assumptions is wrong, but you just haven’t thought to
question it yet.

When you explain the issue to me, I’ll ask dumb questions about context I
lack, so you’ll explain stuff you take for granted. And it’s answering those
questions that will make you figure out where the problem is.

~~~
koonsolo
If I explain the technical stuff to another programmer, spot on indeed.

Managers who don't know what a variable is, SQL or TCP or a while loop or
whatever, in my experience it is just that: dumb questions.

~~~
pdpi
Something's terribly wrong with the hiring if managers for a tech team are
that clueless about tech, though.

~~~
Gibbon1
Sometimes a good manager can help by expanding the solution space or by
shifting the problem somewhere else.

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verroq
Pretty irresponsible to completely brick production servers when doing an
upgrade.

[https://status.kraken.com](https://status.kraken.com)

Sounds like their staff has being going without sleep for a few days now.

~~~
Shank
> Sounds like their staff has being going without sleep for a few days now.

Given that sleep deprivation has effects similar to being blackout drunk, I'd
consider that equally irresponsible[0].

[0]:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/)

~~~
switch007
I've lost count the number of times "watched the sunrise" was the climax of an
IT war story. Bonus points for two nights in a row ! :D

~~~
sambull
Worked for a IT managed services place that made staff pull 24+ hrs non stop
regularly. I walked away from that career and spent years recovering from a 38
hr shift where I was begging my managers to get me relief. "Your the only guy
that knows this well enough" is a sign you work for a failing organization
pinning that shit on you. I learned that the "business" and sales dudes
absolutely will trade your health/lively hood for a few extra bucks on
commission.

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valdiorn
Upgrade a 750 million dollar a day trading system with no rollback strategy.

Amateur hour, and if this were a "real" exchange, they'd lose their licence
and have lawsuits and government agents knocking down their door (real-money
MTFs have strict uptime and infrastructure requirements for anyone who didn't
know)

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hrpnk
They're back with free trading until end of January:
[https://blog.kraken.com/post/1449/kraken-returns-with-
free-t...](https://blog.kraken.com/post/1449/kraken-returns-with-free-
trading/)

~~~
jnordwick
Down again. Amateur hour. Lol.

~~~
Bombthecat
Still no withdraw..

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lowlevel
They say the next big thing is here, that the revolution's near, but to me it
seems quite clear that it's all just a little bit of history repeating

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hndamien
I tend to trust them for security because they are handling the Gox
bankruptcy. For uptime... not so much.

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rootsudo
IT sounds like this week is going to be profitable on Kraken if you trust
their status reports.

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arisAlexis
everything is up and trading is free for the rest of the month. </drama>

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azzhohle
Kraken is notoriously slow, unresponsive and buggy exchange and frankly I dont
know why they get away with it. For months or year(s) you often run into site
unavailable errors (load balancing issues?). Or if you are lucky to get to the
trading screen you are unable to get trades through because of engine issues
(capacity issues again?). Sometimes all you see is an empty red background
rectangle where the error text should be indicating no dice but then
minutes/hours later you might get one or more of the positions you tried to
open despite only having gotten (ambiguous) errors.

Let's hope they finally fixed their engine and purchased more capacity.

