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Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is not working anymore. I got errors after errors. My timeline won't load on mobile at least four times over five. I don't get most of my notifications on the website even when the interaction are right there before my eyes.

It is quite amazing/awful to me how it is possible to break a platform that has been working pretty well for 15 years in a matters of weeks. This is quite fast.

Anyway, most of all I sincerely hope the layed-off people will find another, better job as quickly as they were fired.

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> that has been working pretty well for 15 years

"Fail whale" is a well-used term for a reason. Twitter has always been known for low reliability. It got better, though, but still nowhere near Facebook etc.

Haven't seen the Fail Whale in some time. But Facebook has been glitching terribly the last few months on desktop — mobile is smooth, but desktop has been acting very weird.

I don't mind internet services being down from time to time. What I mind is services that are unreliable, that acts as if they were working while they're not. The fail whale was there from time to time (I've seen my share of her, I've been on Twitter since early 2007), but this time it is different. It's not a "oops something is broken, we're on it and the service will be back soon, sorry" situation. It's a "everything is going wrong and we don't even know if the people who can fix things are still there" situation.

Indeed, it used to be constantly broken in the early 2010s. But I believe it was quite stable by the time it started regaining relevance again with Trump.

Nah. Those were the earliest days, but Twitter has been rock solid for about a decade now. Outages and service degradations were extremely rare.

The Fail whale itself got retired in 2013, and there hasn't been a complete global outage since.

Many World Cup updates do not show up in time (usually delayed by 10-120 minutes). So, Twitter isn't broken but is essentially useless.

The no-login experience was a piece of shit, even before Elon. I click it sometimes when people link to it, and around 1 out of 5 times the page, or some part of it, just simply doesn't load. Working right after a refresh.

Works fine for me.

It mostly works but it's clear that some features are slowly breaking. Maybe it won't matter that it's starting to look rough around the edges but I would love for a real competitor to show up

Good for you, I'm experiencing the exact same issues as the parent comment. Tweets don't load taking multiple refreshes to load, on mobile I get an error every 2nd or 3rd request. Notifications definitely are not popping up anymore and when I click on the tab I do see them but then the next refresh they disappear. Sometimes completely failing to load.

It's not completely broken but I've been definitely experiencing a degradation the past 5-7 days.

One effect of a service degradation like you are describing is that people will hit Reload more often when things appear broken, further increasing the load. This can quickly lead to a cascade failure at a tipping point.

When can you ship your laptop to production?

That's what made Docker popular.

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