What Does Twitter’s Thursday Crash Say About Humans?


By Jueseppi B.

 

 

 

Twitter crashed so hard on June 21 that the site didn’t even display the famous “Fail Whale.” Instead, it simply timed out.

 

 

Unless you were on a secluded island vacation, living under a rock, a prisoner in a max joint or in bed with a sexy erotic woman/man, you know this past Thursday at precisely 12 am Twitter crashed. Hard. How did you react to no Twitter?

 

In the last 15 years we as a species have come to depend on first MySpace, then Facebook, Twitter, and now Pinterest and something called Klout. We can’t live our daily lives without social media of some type shape or form. We are pathetic.

 

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Cue the collective Internet freakout! Twitter went down for several hours on Thursday afternoon, depriving users of a place to complain that Twitter was down.

 

The Twitter outage began at 11:59 a.m. ET, according to Twitter’s page on tracking site Pingdom. Service returned intermittently around 1 p.m., but less than an hour later, Twitter crashed again.

 

“Engineers are currently working to resolve the issue,” a Twitter spokeswoman told CNNMoney.

 

Twitter updated its status blog at 1:42 saying “the issue has been resolved and all services are currently operational” — but at 2:16, another update from Twitter backtracked and said “the issue is on-going.”

 

An hour later, Twitter seemed to be working for most users. Shortly after 3 p.m. ET, Twitter’s PR account tweeted that the issue was caused by “a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components.”

 

That explanation came after a hacker group, UGNazi, claimed to several media outlets that it had taken Twitter down in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

 

The June 21 Twitter outage was the longest service disruption since an hour-long episode on October 7, which came during a month filled with hundreds of very brief outages, according to Pingdom’s data.

 

Downtime is a common problem for websites, though Twitter has been far better lately than it was a few years ago, when the site became notorious for its extensive outages.

 

Thursday’s crash was extensive enough that Twitter didn’t even display its famous “Fail Whale” error message. Instead, the site simply timed out.

 

Twitter’s temporary demise sent users to other social networks, including the blogging site Tumblr. As onecommenter put it on CNNMoney’s own Tech Tumblr: “I enjoy the fact that when Twitter goes down, my Tumblr explodes. :)

 

Others confirmed the crash by checking sites like outage tracker downforeveryoneorjustme.com – which, coincidentally, is the brainchild of a Twitter engineer.

 

Alex Payne wrote about his creation in a 2008 blog post, which also chronicled Twitter’s growing pains at the time: “Of late, I’ve tried as much as possible to focus my time at Twitter on building a new system that works at scale and does so predictably and measurably. That’s not easy when the current system is still on fire.”

 

Compared to those problems, Thursday’s outage appears to be just a tiny little brush fire.

 

I write a small personal blog, and I started using Twitter to market my blog, drive readers to my site. I generally do the same with Facebook. I am as guilty as the next person in spending too much time on Twitter, no matter if I am “working” when I am there on Twitter or not. Thursday when Twitter crashed, I was out shopping for fresh vegetables and fruit at a local farmers market. I didn’t experience the dread or despair that I later found many Tweeters experienced during the crash.

 

Funny thing, I heard of the Twitter crash from shoppers who were using Twitter while shopping. How moronic is that? We can’t drive, walk, eat, use the restroom, make love or work without some type of electronic device that allows us to talk, text, tweet, or Facebook while living an everyday existence.

 

The invention of tablets will be the destruction or humankind as we know it.

I am the only human alive in America who traded the cell phone for an old fashioned landline. I gave up the tablet I got for Christmas last year and although I have several computers/laptops, I am refusing to become an electronics geek.  There was a guy on Twitter selling followers.

 

YES I said there was a guy on Twitter actually selling Twitter followers. $29 for 5K followers up to $200 for 200K followers. Now tell me this, how stupid do you have to be to spend $29 for 5000 people you have nothing in common with, to follow you on Twitter?

 

We need help. Quick. The next great electronic invention will be something we can use while making love that allows us to tweet, Facebook and Pin what we are doing & how we are doing it as we do it.

 

This human race is doomed.

 

 

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10 Responses

  1. I didn’t l know either. Wish it was because I was in bed with an exotic partner.

  2. I was living under a rock in the prison, Twin. I had no idea this Twitter crash occured, and really, I never know until it’s reported. I guess I have more of a life than I think. :-) Matter of fact, I had to switch browsers since being in Saudi and can’t recall my Twitter password. That’s not saying much for me since I was depending on technology to remember it for me but oh well…

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