Twitter meltdown raises questions about site stability The paralysing effect of an internet attack against Twitter has raised questions about the site's apparent fragility. Attacks against accounts maintained by pro-Georgian blogger Cyxymu at a number of social networking sites including Facebook, Blogger and LiveJournal as well as Twitter, and apparently aimed at silencing him, …
The only question it raises for me is "Who would give a stuff if it fell down and never got back up again?" What exactly bad would happen apart from a bunch of spotty self-interested navel-gazing blog-o-spherical nerds having to go outside and get some fresh air for a change?
Why in the hell would Twitter need redundancy and disaster recovery plans in place? They don't really generate any significant revenue, they don't store sensitive data; hell, they aren't even a business - Twitter is a free online service whose only purpose is to give otherwise useless people a way to feel relevant.
It looks better on the books as well. This incident will be forgotten about in about 430,000 Tweets (about 1.2 minutes) and Twitter still won't have had to invest millions on redundant infrastructure.
Twitter is looking to get swallowed up at some point and whoever buys it will be buying a brand, not an infrastructure. From a whore yourself out management perspective it's a sound strategy - less overhead, less debt = easier sell, more profit.
It's not this meltdown that raised questions about Twitter's stability. Frankly, those of us who were on Twitter before Oprah know that outages like this were pretty commonplace last year, albeit not for the same reason. Twitter used to go down for hours every week or so - so *this* isn't raising questions about anything. It's nothing we haven't already known.
I should also add that Facebook also suffered severe problems yesterday as a result of this attack. While the site didn't go down all the way, it was broken/useless for most people using it, the API was busted, and even something as simple as posting a status update would fail with network errors or the connection would be interrupted before it could finish loading.
Any website using Facebook Connect was unable to authenticate.
So basically, Facebook *was* down too.
Twitter wasn't the only one that felt this, and Facebook, frankly, has a larger userbase, a business model and a lot of money. They arguably should have been in a better position to handle this quickly.
It's easy to blame the "obvious villain", but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody was trying to make the Russians (or a Russian) look like baddies.
The real villains, of course, are the refusniks who keep on running Windows day in and day out, letting themselves get infected with some Goddam Ruskie malware, which is then used against noble Western web sites. If they were using Linux zzzzzzzz.
... who really gives a shit about Twitter!
If it served any useful purpose apart from allowing Twits to babble about what happens to be going through their minds at that particular moment, perhaps someone might actually give a damn.
Hmm...
One of the things Ford Prefect found hard to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and re-stating the very, very obvious, as in: “It’s a nice day”, “You’re very tall” or “So this is it; we are going to die”.
At first, Ford formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. ‘If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips’ he thought ‘their mouths probably seize up’. After a while he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. ‘If they don’t keep exercising their lips’ he thought ‘their brains start working’...
Well, Ford, you were close...!
was Twitter a serious and important device in our world!?
What next, oh noes FacePalm has gone tits up! I cant see what bob/john/jane/sarah has been doing for the last 5 minutes!!!!! one one !111 !! etc
Come on, this is not news, if it is then ..... meh ...... I might spend *all* my time on B3ta...
I refuse to use Twitter, and can't see why it's thought of as a revolutionary communication medium--it's just Instant Messaging on the web. Much like how "podcasting" is recorded audio with the twist of being downloaded onto on iPod.
The biggest fans of all this Web 2.0 garbage seem to be the twenty-something Generation Y crowd, who really believe their Tweets are important and the entire world should hear about it.
Listening to them talk, things like Twitter are redefining our very social consciousness, stopping global warming, and giving meaning to their lives. They'll hail about how great and revolutionary it is until they find the next oh-cool app and forget all about it.
Meanwhile other things get neglected, such as interacting in the real world and the working at their job. Twitter, may you fade quickly into the oblivion.
I totally agree. How can a free service like Twitter possibly provide the levels of protection of Google who charge every time you use one of their services.............oh...........hang on a minute.
I'm sorry, there appears to be a slight flaw in your apologist argument.
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