There's a pattern of diverging expectations here, one is the non-technical/naïve one,
- Twitter is going to go down tomorrow and it's all over. RIP.
The second is,
- Twitter is going to experience a failure cascade over time.
The third is,
- It's all going to be fine.
I suspect that the real question is, how many individual wires can break before the cable holding the suspended platform snaps?
I am not that good of a developer, but watching Twitter I can't help but be reminded of Arecibo, except at a larger, more abstract scale. There was no single massive event that caused the failure, rather a series of factors and events, tiny cables breaking that eventually leads to a failure cascade that then causes the suspended platform to crash.
From what I can tell, in the past week or so,
- Twitter's copyright system failed
- Two Factor Authentication broke down (it seems to be back up?)
- (anecdata) Tweets have been loading sporadically for me and other people, sometimes we try to open a tweet and it says that it doesn't exist. Happens more frequently with new/recent tweets.
- (unconfirmed) Twitter's managed account backend is behaving "strangely." For e.g., "One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated." from https://www.teamblind.com/post/i-told-my-team-to-pause-our-750kmonth-twitter-ads-budget-last-week-4dnbo1Ft ———— Friends have told me other similar stories
Are these failures symptomatic of a larger problem, or are they well-isolated parts misbehaving? Can Twitter even experience a failure cascade like Arecibo? Can that be paused/stopped?
I am asking this question because I don't know. And I'd like to develop a better mental model to understand what happens next.
Also anecdote, but twitter has historically been pretty unreliable for me.
Without a reliable twitter systems status history pre-acquisition, the reports of failures, like the issues with the 2FA system, don't mean a whole lot.
Definitely this. I regularly see people complaining about ancient bugs as if they were new after the acquisition. Nope, you just are engaged enough to notice them now.
After the failwhale days, Twitter has been quite stable for me with the only exception being the live-refresh features on tabs of the website that have been open for days (which I don't think many websites would handle well).
There has been a serious degradation in the quality since the acquisition:
- Sporadically loading tweets - I could go on some tweets and refresh the page multiple times, with tweets fading in and out of existence showing "This tweet is unavailable"
- Tweets that quote tweets of accounts you have blocked behave weird in multiple ways. Sometimes it's just showing a "This tweet is unavailable" instead of "This tweet is from an account you have blocked", and a few interacting with them crashed my timeline on mobile, having to restart the app
- On a few occurences, every third tweet on the timeline was an ad
- 1-2 notifications from crypto spam bots reaching me every day. The same thing previously was filtered out quite reliably (I assume), since then it happened ~once ever 6 months
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And those are only the things I've seen personally. Yeah, they are no deal-breakers, and mostly sporadic failures, but it very much feels like a service that is degrading by the day.
Perhaps the failure mode is like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, with Elon as the wind, the undulations his whipsaw changes of mind, and the employees the hapless cars being flung into the river.
I am not that good of a developer, but watching Twitter I can't help but be reminded of Arecibo, except at a larger, more abstract scale. There was no single massive event that caused the failure, rather a series of factors and events, tiny cables breaking that eventually leads to a failure cascade that then causes the suspended platform to crash.
From what I can tell, in the past week or so,
Are these failures symptomatic of a larger problem, or are they well-isolated parts misbehaving? Can Twitter even experience a failure cascade like Arecibo? Can that be paused/stopped?I am asking this question because I don't know. And I'd like to develop a better mental model to understand what happens next.