I take it no such outages occurred in the prior history of twitter?

16h is an awful lot for a social media site, even if region-specific.

Single digit number of hours happen from time to time, but double digits are not really a thing anymore. Maybe in early days of social media, not in the past decade.

Well, RIP twitter I guess. Although strangely if I search the news archives for outages with date set to before 2022..

You get what? Anything close to that long? Don't leave me hanging!

I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016, but I thought it was irrelevant because articles about outages aren't exactly top-notch in quality.

Did you find anything better? If so, do share! I'd be happy to be proven wrong!

> I did the same and found a Guardian article that claims no Twitter outage lasted even an hour since 2016

Actual Guardian article from 2016 discussing twitter outage lasting more than one hour:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/19/twitter-d...

Amusing comments over there from readers.

You are right and I am wrong. And I'm sorry. RIP Twitter.

How is that against what I said? I said no outage lasted over an hour since 2016 and you disprove that by posting a 2016 article of an outage that lasted maybe two hours? (I don't know, the article doesn't specify.)

Is let's say five hours and sixteen hours within the same ballpark? I'm not interested in a couple of hours, my claim is not one lasted 10 or more in the past decade. If such a thing actually happened, I'm sure someone would've posted it by now.

So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over for decades then?

No, they happened. They didn't last a double digit number of hours though.

Not gonna say in decades, but in the past decade for sure.

Nobody said "absolutely no outages happened [..] for decades" and the fact that they did doesn't refute what you're replying to.

You're not being downvoted for not being irrationally angry at Musk. You're being downvoted for being disingenuous in a very obvious way and then pretending the downvotes prove you right.

I feel that my downvote won’t accurately express my dislike of this comment, so to provide a further explanation: you’re making absolutely zero effort to engage with this conversation. You’ve completely fabricated a point of view to oppose. Nobody here can be construed as being on the opposing side of “things have downtime sometimes”. I’ve every right to believe that you’re an Elon Musk fanboy because your reaction seems incredibly emotionally driven.

If anything is emotionally driven, it's your reply.

I am also interested to know if outages happened before or is a recent phenomenon. I don't have a stake for electric car space man, or furiously despise him for god knows what as per above.

> simple question really shows the irrationality and emotive reaction about anything Twitter because of Elon Musk

I think you're right here, just not in the way you intended. Because this is not a reasonable standard to use:

> So absolutely no outages happened before Musk took over in the past decade then?

Twitter used to be extremely unreliable, and in fact back on the late noughties this was commonly seen as a reason that Twitter was doomed and would be replaced by other microblogging platforms (there was precedent; a number of early social media sites had already died essentially due to unreliability).

Eventually, it became fairly rock solid, and has stayed like that since. A reversion to "oh, yeah, essential features are down for hours, that's just Twitter being Twitter" definitely feels like going back to the noughties.

> Is 16h of downtime acceptable for a $44b business?

After a 70% reduction in headcount, is a 16 hour downtime acceptable in a 5% market? I'm going with yes, executives from all major corporations are itching to press that button if only they could get away with it.

The problem with Twitter is not, was not, and will never be a technical one. It's a simple site with a simple tech stack, using standard technology to scale.

The problem with Twitter, and what Musk doesn't seem to understand, is a sociological and political one. Social networks are the crack cocaine of tabloid media, left to the whims of bad actors they can destroy democracies, incite lynchings, distribute hate and misinformation on scales without historical precedent. "Free speech" just doesn't cut it, social networks are publications not mediums, they chose what people get to see and react to, and the fact that the choice is made by an algorithm does not absolve them of responsibility for the consequences, especially if the algorithm is tuned for revenue maximization and easily gamed by bad actors to spread their content.

By firing the watchers, Musk is setting Twitter up as an menace to stable democracies around the world.

At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple. Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

But the current staff needs to maintain code from a MUCH larger staff. That's hard. Especially with microservices where every team did "their own thing" and some teams just vanished completely. You have "dark areas" where no one knows how stuff works and what's going on.

Normally when you downsize at this scale you do this in an orderly way. Every person hands off their work and responsibility. Spends a couple of weeks writing docs and instructions and then leaves. This was done quickly and violently. I'm sure there's many repercussions we don't see simply because the systems are simply running. Once the team looks at some containers and decides to pull the plug to "see what happens" we'll find out...

> “At the scale twitter exists right now it is anything but simple“

Elon should get real experts like Infosys or Wipro in to rebuild it.

Sometimes it's really hard to tell if people are joking or serious in HN...

They are seriously joking.

I thought adding /s would kill the joke ;-)

> Had it been built from scratch it could have run fine with its current staff.

So you are essentially saying Twitter has an over-complicated architecture with regards to its real technical needs, so Musk was right to axe the microservice zealots. Good we can agree on that.

The next step is to acknowledge that code and data-centers continue to work long after their original designers have left the company, that's what computers are, tools for automation. Keeping the lights on and services in a roughly functional state is an activity that requires much less people of relatively lower qualification, even if they couldn't have engineered it themselves.

Yes, there is a long term risk of code rot and entropy if Musk does not plan for a gradual transition to a better engineered architecture with competent maintainers. But we are not there yet, far from it.

Meanwhile, schadenfreude people have rooted for a twittocaplipse from day one, nay, predicted it as inevitable. There is absolutely no sign it's going to happen, and Twitter turned out sufficiently simple after all on the technical side.

People choose to use social media, as they choose all media. People are individually responsible for the physical actions they make, even if a little bird told them what to do. It may be easier to control people by limiting what thoughts they're exposed to, but a people isn't free if that's done.

It's all fun and games until you are slain in the street because people chose to regard you as subhuman after a little bird told them so.

Disseminating politically extreme misinformation kills people - look no further than Russia, where a state run propaganda campaign has made people no more stupid or immoral than you or me support a vicious war of aggression against their neighbors.

No, the killer kills physically. Being told to is no excuse.

No.

I don't see leftists compaining about free (leftist) speech on Reddit or 4chan, for some reason the free speech is only problematic on twitter

They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion, so they are irrelevant. Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that.

For an example of toxic ideological delusion in the left camp you can see the harm done to adolescents by the gender nuts, it's absolutely out of control on Reddit and there will be reckoning day with its many victims.

>They don't have the scale to sway large parts of the public opinion

According to some infographic in a thread on HN yesterday, reddit is currently the most viewed site in the US, Australia and a few other countries, so it seems like it could have a sway on large parts of public opinion

Reddit's usage is heavily oriented toward silos though, being the subreddits that people subscribe to, and the most controversial are excluded from the All feed.

It doesn't have the same dynamics as Facebook and Twitter in terms of how posts/tweets/ideas get spread out all over the network.

>Also, what you call "left" might simply be the truth, and it's very hard to fight against that.

But modern post-modern leftism is subjectivist, relativist and does not believe that an objective "the truth" exist - hence if leftism is the truth, leftism is wrong.

They've likely learned a lot from that incident already.

No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.

> No, Twitter isn't gonna "blow up" overnight. That's nonsense.

It's also not something any of the parent comments claimed.

If they hadn't purged the entire staff they wouldn't need to relearn the same lessons

Facebook had downtime on all services, globally... for like 7 hours 2021, facebook is how many orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter?

And a regional outage vs the internet claiming twitter would be offline completely?

Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most.

A regional outage of that size is embarrassing whatever way you slice it.

Leaving all that aside, he’s driving a massive subset of his users away at a time when he really needs all the users he can get.

You can spin this however you like, this is not a good situation for him. He’s said as much outright and implied it repeatedly.

Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.

This is dire for him.

> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy, and Tesla has been flat out told FSD, the feature they’ve been selling all their cars based on (which he has said himself the company is worthless without), just isn’t happening.

As much as I hope Elon loses everthing. This isn't even related to downtime of Twitter. Volentarly shutting down twitter due to it being bankrupt is not the same as it falling over and having outages.

So I'm really not trying to spin anything. You're trying to take something unrelated and use it as justification as to why big bad billionaire do bad.

This is a fair comment, I'll clarify why I mentioned that.

Bringing up Tesla and SpaceX was only to point out that he doesn't really have any way to bail out bad Twitter decisions despite it being a (relatively) smaller company. There's nowhere to pull extra finances from to bail this out, and it's known he already went into debt to make the purchase.

I really don't want him to lose anything. I'd like him to go back in time to when he first installed Twitter on his phone and slap the thing out of his own hand and scream "NO! THAT'S A BAD ELON!"

In that case I agree.

I can assume one of the primary reasons for cutting staff and offices is to reduce costs and hopefully get cash flow positive asap even if it’s $1 positive. That puts him in a better position to stop incurring debt.

Maybe spray him with a water bottle to really discourage the behavior.

All the money in the world and what he really needed was a close family member to wave a rolled up newspaper at him disapprovingly.

Not to disagree with your general point, I just want to nitpick this:

Half an order of magnitude bigger, at most

I think you're overestimating Twitter and underestimating Facebook.

I don't know the best source for official stats, but a quick google suggests Twitter is ~300M users and Facebook is ~3B, so one order of magnitude.

And of course the new Twitter CEO used the interesting bargaining tactic of talking down his own purchase by implying many of those 300M users are bots... Joking aside, you could argue that very few of those 3B Facebook users are active, and you'd be right; but exactly the same can be said of Twitter and there's no good reason to think the ratio is any better or worse there.

> Since this time last year he’s said that both Twitter and SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy

At least in the case of SpaceX the US government will more likely than not step in and nationalize them out of national security requirements.

It always good to have fallback solution, isn't it?

That's nice for the US space industry, but won't help Elon in the slightest with his money problems.

>SpaceX are likely months from bankruptcy

Companies months from bankruptcy don’t get to take a higher valuation in a down market: https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/03/elon-musks-space...

SpaceX is a great company, worth investing into, because of their ISP + phone telco business (lot of people are ready to pay a high price for that) and a very difficult space technology to reproduce, nobody is going to compete soon. Twitter is different, it's more like MySpace.

StarLink isn’t profitable, so that’s the kiss of death in a down market. Doesn’t matter how good the product is or how much people will pay if the replacement satellites to keep it running cost more.

StarLink is the right out of the book case for VC investment. One should expect several years before it gets profitable, and with very large initial investment. It's also very difficult to replicate, so whatever market there is there is a high likelihood for it to capture.

That means that it should be judged like a startup. Did it demonstrate a market? If so, it's valuable, if not, it's not. Current cash flow isn't very relevant.

Starlink is likely roughly break even launching on Falcon 9. The latest $137B valuation is likely predicated on Starship working as expected.

Still, when the president of a company tells that to his employees, you can't completely ignore his words, even if it's Elon Musk.

And that outage was the first of its kind in a long time and made a lot of news. It's not like this is usual in any way.

Why do we care so much though? Given the outsized influence Twitter has over politics and society, is it so bad if it shuts down and we have a few years reprieve? Musk has just lost an ungodly sum of money and has loans to repay. He’s not going to be running things for the benefit for humanity.

Musk needs to care because if his little site is not online when people want to post, they won't use it. I applaud that he doesn't though, makes it so much funnier watching this unfold.

Do you remember July 08,2022 when Rogers Communications went down for about 19 hours and services like 911 and Interac a payment service almost all Canadians use was interrupted? I guess it can happen to even the most critical of services.