A few parts clearly did go down. 2FA login was just serving error codes all day a few days ago. On Saturday people were posting entire feature films, 2 minutes per tweet, because apparently their copyright content matching wasn’t working.
I would use it as a case in point. You have one group claiming that Twitter is completely on fire and soon to be closed, and the other saying it's never been better and there was zero fallout from rapidly firing thousands of people including a lot of engineers.
Neither of those extreme viewpoints reflected reality accurately. There were significant problems, but they did not take the entire site down or anything. In fact, for millions who did not have 2FA or use it at that point, they did not see any issue. Whereas people that wanted to find an issue could go looking for the movies. So each side was able to find ways to reinforce their alternate realities.
I think both sides are correct. Anyone with experience at the scale knows that if everyone stops working, the site becomes more reliable. Holiday freezes demonstrate this. But holiday freezes also demonstrate the other thing: if left alone for too long the systems start to rot, from memory leaks and cache ossification and other things that usually aren't noticed during active development.
Personally, I doubt that it will be anything technological that ends Twitter. It will be economic. Their advertising revenue has been decimated and their operating costs have never been higher.
that's surprising actually. I'd expect my sites to run for about a year if i suddenly died. maybe longer. certs will renew themselves, servers will restart themselves. everything is on autopay.
the thing to kill it would probably be api breaks by 3rd parties.
maybe disk space would kill me eventually too.. i don't have auto resizing for my sql database but its got a long runway yet. or god forbid my site grows on its own and the qps kills it.
I mean, twitter is incomparably more complex than your website (I assume you don’t sit over google or Facebook), plus I’m sure elon made people poke at the system (“we only need 20% of the mucroservices”…)
It's hard to really say whether that was due to something Elon did or if it was just a normal outage from code deployments, hardware failures, etc. Anything that might seem like an outage will be magnified now because everyone will think it was Elon's doing and it will get tons of clicks. The reality is that these huge sites have a dozen small/medium outages almost every day, but almost no one notices.
The QRT system doesn't work (if a post says it has 200 quote tweets, you can always open it and never see any), but then again, it never did seem to work.
It's still entirely believable the site will go down and remain down for a week or two at any time.
The extent of the 2FA issue I saw - which, by the way, was w.r.t. sms-based 2fa login, not other 2fa methods - was a single screenshot making this claim.
I wouldn’t be surprised. There were definitely a few bugs. I think ppl unhappy with Elon overplayed things though and now it will look silly.
Our expectations were anchored by the idea that Twitter would cease to exist. So very real problems like 2FA going down look trivial compared to the former.
