Quite honestly, I wonder how much of this can be traced back to the fact that there are way too many layers of abstractions between the browser requests coming in and a cpu actually executing something to serve the request.
I don’t know about empirical data, but HN occasionally goes into a mode where page loads that don’t hit the cache (logged in users) take 10+ seconds. I haven’t been on when it’s gone down completely since i signed up (not too long ago).
I was also under that impression until the Cloudflare event happened. I do not actually know what their dependency was, but all shops were taken offline.
Hm. If you were going to plan a worldwide internet outage (or the appearance of one) you could test your ability to take down individual services first and then take them all down at once.
Given that today was the White House's "Social Media Summit", no doubt there will be a few conspiracies floated. I'm betting "Twitter wanted to block out all the criticism coming form the summit!" will be a popular one.
I've got a couple conspiracy theories at the moment:
1. It's a deployment of some infrastructure change the government got the big tech companies to sign onto.
2. It's a "shot across the bow" from some external party to demonstrate their control over major infrastructure.
2.a. Also could have been a mix of 1 and 2. The government orchestrated the outages in order to add fuel to the hysteria over Chinese "spy chips". However, given the story every time seems to be "Someone goofed a configuration", this theory doesn't seem to have much life left in it.
Nah that's low level conspiracies. The new tier are in the vein "Twitter/Facebook/Google is currently being raided and forced to copy over DBs for an ongoing investigation into surveillance/censorship/pizza/Molochworship".
What is the new fail mascot called? It looks like a cartoonish-alien with a PacMan/snipper hand and another hand that looks like a burning fuse standing next to a bomb with a fuse lit that is split open so it also looks like a PacMan
I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the announced new "Look and Feel" for Twitter. I got a banner yesterday talking about it and now Twitter is down. Maybe they messed up something in preparation for the rollout?
I first noticed the outage about 10 mins ago in Safari (Mac). It repeatedly gave me errors, even though Brave (Mac) was working fine. My iPhone app also worked fine (and appears to still be working).
Why would one browser work but another not work, on the same computer at the same IP? The only difference is the account I'm logged in through (personal/work).
Just last week I found a setting deep in my profile config that let me disable ‘recommended tweets first’ or similar. When it’s back up I can check the exact setting
A lot of high-profile outages recently. Can't actually remember the last time Twitter went fully down. Have to confess I immediately assumed an issue with my own connection, even though every other site is working.
Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head
> Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head
That phrase was coined by Harlan Ellison in his classic scifi short story to represent a situation of complete despair and powerlessness.
I don't think a lack of Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook or Gmail -- however inconvenient -- would fill me with that kind of existential dread :)
honestly i feel unmoored without tweetdeck on my second screen ticking by. i realise this is probably a bad thing, but getting my daily news and info, i'd say 90% comes from twitter.
I got rid of all of those except Gmail (need it for work, school, etc) and WhatsApp (only use for one group chat) and it is very freeing. I realized social media (Instagram especially) breeds unhappiness with your life, while all of the models and "influencers" on it don't live realistic lives. In fact I've experienced first had that their posts are often doctored or don't acctually portray the situation accurately.
Yesterday, Stripe went down for a half hour, and the later yesterday, Google's Android Payment Validation API went down for more than 2 hours.
Stripe at least acknowledged their downtime. Google was oblivious, made no update to any of their status pages. Really horrendous awareness and support from Google per usual.
Twitter is especially weird for this since it's often a platform where people talk about downtimes. I don't see this downtime mentioned on Reddit and I don't know of other sites where it might be discussed, so if Hacker News happened to go down at the same time, where would I go to talk about it with online strangers and find out if it's just me? Nowhere, I guess, I'd just wait it out with no extra insights on what's going on. A small reminder of what the world used to be like haha.
This is the time it takes for news in major subreddits to gather enough votes on the "new" tab to make it to the main subreddit front page, then the actual front page.
Smaller subreddits seem to be less affected by this, which is why /r/toosoon (a subreddit dedicated to dark humor related to current events) is often surfaces news hours before other subs for people who have it in their subreddit list.
I do love that this site still exists years later. I still use it regularly. It only took me like three years to remember the name right the first time.
It makes me wonder if a powerful malicious agent can devise a complex operation (planting people in several key places) and wipe out most of the databases of one these places. It would be interesting to see what would it happen if suddenly all of twitter of facebook is deleted , puff!, gone in a second.
Wipe the encryption key of your SSD, small amount of data to wipe, and the whole SSD is unrecoverable.
FWIW at least OCZ SSDs have an encryption key flashed into it even if you didn't turn encryption on. Putting a new firmware on it can wipe this key and make your old data inaccessible. Source: got a buggy OCZ firmware that failed to make the device appear on the SATA bus, only way OCZ could fix it was to install new firmware which wiped the key and hence my data was unrecoverable.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if the Internet really is super vulnerable, and the only reason there isn't a mass disruption of communication all the time is because some script kiddies's Pizza Rolls were perfect today so he held off on attacking a backbone.
This is actually true of most of the modern world.
It is mostly still together because the venn diagram of those who want to see the world burn, and those who are clever enough to make it so has a very very small intersection, since the latter group is quite invested in the world not being on fire.
Yes, I think people tend to underestimate the chaos some malicious actors could do by even "just" coordinated litteral burning of stuff. Think a dozen people with cans of gasoline and matches spread over three different suburbias in a city, wooden churches or other wooden buildings of interest. Or simple firebombs on underground subway plattforms. Would probably not be that lethal but I guess very frighting.
(Not even mentioning explosives etc, but this could probably be prepared in like an hour by just purchasing supplies at local gas stations in any country)
as someone else mentioned above this is a website/service that's down, not the internet. When you can't open a socket to a server in another network then the Internet is down.
543 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadOnly the self-entitled "gatekeepers" are failing, and I'm glad they do.
2. I bet it’s trending. Let me check.
3. …
4. Oh.
1. It's a deployment of some infrastructure change the government got the big tech companies to sign onto.
2. It's a "shot across the bow" from some external party to demonstrate their control over major infrastructure.
2.a. Also could have been a mix of 1 and 2. The government orchestrated the outages in order to add fuel to the hysteria over Chinese "spy chips". However, given the story every time seems to be "Someone goofed a configuration", this theory doesn't seem to have much life left in it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...
source: work there
no, just a bad config deploy.
I started a thread for sharing instances: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414359
There's also Pleroma and Misskey.
part of me hates the idea
Anything else is centralised and inherently evil. Even the orange website.
Why would one browser work but another not work, on the same computer at the same IP? The only difference is the account I'm logged in through (personal/work).
Unrelated, but for some reason the phrase "I have no mouth and I must scream" just popped into my head
That phrase was coined by Harlan Ellison in his classic scifi short story to represent a situation of complete despair and powerlessness.
I don't think a lack of Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook or Gmail -- however inconvenient -- would fill me with that kind of existential dread :)
Stripe at least acknowledged their downtime. Google was oblivious, made no update to any of their status pages. Really horrendous awareness and support from Google per usual.
Smaller subreddits seem to be less affected by this, which is why /r/toosoon (a subreddit dedicated to dark humor related to current events) is often surfaces news hours before other subs for people who have it in their subreddit list.
https://downdetector.com/status/twitter
at least on r/twitter
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages/2019-July/012527.h...
Then again things have been going down over the past two weeks so it's probably just coincidence.
It is mostly still together because the venn diagram of those who want to see the world burn, and those who are clever enough to make it so has a very very small intersection, since the latter group is quite invested in the world not being on fire.
(Not even mentioning explosives etc, but this could probably be prepared in like an hour by just purchasing supplies at local gas stations in any country)
The true deplorables.
FTFY. In my experience both sides of politics have weak minded people that can't experience critical thinking.
ETA: Awesome. The downvotes and "flagged" status are great to support my statement. Thanks for the fish!
Could be bad deployment or someone decided to pull few plug(s)