Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

x is down: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/x-is-down.html

Well, it is newsworthy at least.

Sure, being upset/getting angry just because of a little bit of Twitter downtime is stupid, but that doesn't take away from the fact that one of the biggest and most important discussion and communication channels the web has is completely down.

I don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.

If a large manufacturer had a fire in their facility, it would certainly be industry news. This seems like a similar situation.

This is more like a large manufacturer having a power outage. A fire would destroy machinery or stock. Nothing's getting lost here, something's just unavailable.

But a large manufacturer having a power outage, for, an hour like we are here, would cause a great deal of trouble with anything downstream of that manufacturer. And I'd be willing to bet that industry sources, mailing lists, forums, (whatever the manufacturing equivalent of HN is) would be discussing the outage, how bad it is, how this is going to completely screw up profits, how irritated they are, etc, etc.

You don't think GM or Ford have ever lost power for an hour? Did you ever read about it? Did the car dealerships suddenly run out of cars for one hour three weeks later? I think you are vastly overestimating the impact transient events like this have.

And I think you are vastly underestimating the percieved impact by the people involved, which was kind of my point.

Both Twitter going down for an hour and a plant that assembles cars going down for an hour aren't that big of a deal in the huge scheme of things, but for people who are intimately connected (either work there, know someone who does, are emotionally connected to the product in some fashion, etc), it feels a lot bigger than it is.

I think it's only newsworthy in this space - where, as some of us are the ones responsible for these systems - we are trying to learn why this happened in order to prevent it.

You know, learn from others mistakes and all.

I agree that learning from why Twitter was down will be interesting and when that story comes out I hope it will be high on Hacker News. But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.

It seems like your perspective is that HN exists for the links it points to. I read HN for the discussion, and this thread has many good discussions in it.

> But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.

The single most important part of the internet is the immediate availability of news (to me, anyway). I've never heard anyone complain about that before; why do you think it's not worth knowing and talking about events as they happen? 'Twitter is down' isn't noise. Years and years ago there were stories about fire departments (SF I think?) that started using Twitter to send out fire notices. Here in Montreal, the police tweet very quickly and accurately about our daily student protests.

Twitter is extremely important to a huge number of people, and when it goes down, a site like HN definitely should be talking about it. It's big news and it's almost exclusively relevant while it's happening.

I love the internet.

So, here in the UK Twitter is back for me. It looks like I was without it for about 45 minutes. Call it an hour for a nice round figure.

Think about these two scenarios:

1. During that one hour you spend your time focussed on talking about this event as it's happening, speculating, having an emotional response (because you can't access something you want to and find a group of people experiencing the same thing and all get together to experience the frustration).

2. Tomorrow you read a story that says "Twitter was down for one hour yesterday" with some detail about what happened.

I believe that the latter is preferable. It's more efficient, less emotional and more useful. The former is the same as watching some 'Breaking News' event while is happening.

Now imagine that the one hour of downtime happened when you were asleep. You've missed nothing.

There are two scenarios where this news is important: if your business depends on Twitter, and if you are trying to assess the reliability of Twitter. The latter can be achieved by #2 above, only the former needs real-time updates and that doesn't mean general news reporting just your own monitoring.

As a person whose love of news started at age five scrapbooking newspaper clippings about Nixon, Ford, and Carter, your point makes me very happy.

The 24 hr news cycle ruined TV news, and SEO has made Internet news worse (first links win).

If one of the largest services in the valley being down is not tech news, then what exactly do you think would be news?

Think of "twitter being down" as Silicon Valleys equivalent to hollywoods "Lindsey Lohan is drunk in jail again"..

The tech companies, their founders staff and services are our pop-culture to gossip about.

> Think of "twitter being down" as Silicon Valleys equivalent to hollywoods "Lindsey Lohan is drunk in jail again"..

This is Hacker News, not Globe for Hackers. Seriously, tabloid-esque coverage of tech companies adds nothing of value at all.

it's called hacker news. but for starters, "hacker" implies not being spineless or giving a fuck about peer groups. hackers also don't like censorship; so you see how hacker news is anything but. it's an involuntary joke, nothing more.

the word has been appropiated by those who are needy like that: you don't call yourself hacker, just like you don't call yourself saint. only mediocre people to whom it never applied and never will would do that. the end.

That's a good blog post. But "x is down" is newsworthy for sufficiently large number of users of x and sufficently long downtime. That's because consumer experience with this or that online service influences the online service's reputation. A service with few users, or users who have lower expectations, can endure more downtime without loss of reputation than a service with many users who expect the service simply always to be available, at least as available as broadcast television or plain-old telephone service.

xx Next time your favorite waste of time is down, just shut up about it. xx

Twitter is infrastructure for us in media. It's well worth discussion.

that's what you get for not using RSS.

also, "us in the media", what kind of whore talk is that even? twitter is correctly referrerd to in w3c docs as medium preventing intelligent discussion. so it was down? GOOD. people are inconvenienced? even better! it cannot possibly have hit anyone or anything that was worth fuck all.

Cool it on the ad hominem please

I'm not sure why you suggest RSS is somehow synonymous with Twitter, but I will say that in addition to RSS buttons almost every major media company on the planet has a Twitter button on its article page (I work on one, which is why I say "us in media"). Because many sites don't do proper async JS when it comes to social buttons, an outage on socnets can be crippling

Here's an example: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/01/facebook-outage-affects-oth...

Hello, Dave

This deserves to be the top comment. Your one liner nailed it. Twitter was down long enough for far more people not to notice than did notice. Shit goes down. It always will. Whining about how whoever needs backups or failover protection or distributed networks of servers across the planet or should use a VPS instead or a dedicated server instead or Heroku instead or EC2 instead or a combination of all that crap doesn't make you right. It makes you a speculator. No amount of fallbacks will give you 100% uptime ever. And calling this a massive failure is also ludicrous. It's just some downtime. It went right back up so chill.

These posts are so incredibly annoying. We can see if service x is down for ourselves. That isn't news. I could maybe accept these stories if the link on the front page was to a blog post stating that not only is service x down but why it went down for sure plus an added lesson we can learn from it. Short of that it's become an easy way for people to build up a trillion karma points. And if you want to tell me you don't care about karma then you're either lying or you have none. Enough with this crap. We'll find out ourselves but most of us won't actually because we have lives and by the time we go online to check our favorite wank-off site it'll probably be back up again like the past fifty times I've seen a story about Heroku/AWS/Twitter being down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com