November 2008
1 post
Same story, different month
Its like you can only pose for so many front-page exposes on your company before you have to start doing some work. My favorite was when <a href=”http://twitter.com/ev”>ev</a> was talking about how we’ve been spending the past few months building new features for Twitter. Ha! I love it. <strong>Writing</strong> features?! Fuck that. We’re...
September 2008
3 posts
New features, fun but don't expect change
Sure. We can’t really keep Twitter up. We’re introducing new bugs all the time. Whatever. Get over it. Its not like IM and Track have been off since May. Oh wait. They have.
In any case, we’ve been hard at work on a bunch of features you could care less about. You’ll notice a sexy new “Election ‘08” banner across the top of the site now. It takes...
Logging in
WTF?! You want to login?! Jez-sus people. Get over yerselves. Don’t you people understand we’re in the middle of a financial crisis?!
We’re blaming that bitch Katie Couric for our latest outage; how could she ask the defender our our Northern Frontier about her experience in foreign affairs. But we digress.
Missing Tweets
We find it hilariously ironic that you people think you own your tweets. “Where are my tweets?!” you keep bitching. Read the TOS you morons; once you tweet it, we can do whatever the hell we want with it. Including lose it. Or put it in someone elses profile. Or reverse the characters or munge the punctuation. Why? Because we can.
In all actuality, we had some issues with our...
July 2008
9 posts
Unplanned outage
Its a case of the Mondays but on a Tuesday. WTF?!
We’re having some “issues” with our “database” so we had to go “offline”.
“Issues” you ask? Well. Its rather complicated. You see. Our database cheated on us. I know, I know. It was embarrassed that we always point the fingers at it and not at ourselves. It was crying out for attention...
Followers and Followings == FAIL
WTF people?! Okay, okay. We know something is up and we’re working on fixing so STFU. Geez. You’d think you people depend on this service or something.
Here’s the deal. We think we know what it is. We sent a bunch of our engineers on a mad dash up to Portland, OR for OSCON because we’d heard (via our latest acquistion Summize no less) that there were a shit ton of...
Summize acquisition complete, let the sucking...
We have finally subsumed Summize and we’re doing everything we can to fuck up the site. To that point, we’re removing several really handy features as well as generally slowing it down.
Honestly we’re glad we acquired these guys; they were really, really starting to make us look bad. As an added bonus, its a lot easier for us to find Twitter haters again and we’re...
Interviews with mean people
This has nothing to do with the status of the Twitter service. However, it indicative of the grief we pour souls have to endure every, single day. We work hard to provide less than mediocre service. You people should be happy with us.
The following are a few excerpts from an interview we did with “Asshole Interviewer” (hereto referred to as “AI”). We could have let...
Check us out, bitch
Yeah, we’re a little lippy today. Why you ask? Well, it has nothing to do with the fact that like half the company is at FooCamp. You can’t buy that kind of cool. No siree. Two words: up time. Fuck. That’s like one word. Whatever, look at this graph suckers!:
Now, I know what you’re thinking. How does compare to someone like, say, Google? It doesn’t. ...
Silly identi.ca, you're no match for our service...
Awwww. How cute. Somebody thinks they can launch an “open” microblogging service. Fat chance. How can you compete with our rabid user base?! Its impossible. We beat our users senseless with outages, disabling features and general malaise and yet they still return day-after-day. You have a lot to live up to my Canadian friends.
It appears this morning that they’re having...
Quick "Upgrades"
You’re totally going to laugh about this one. Somebody tripped over the power cable in our new offices and through some kind of “Butterfly Effect” kind of thing, the entire website went down. Go figure.
In the mean time, we’re all just hanging out in the new office (those of us that make it in here before 10am that is) waiting for services to come back up. ETA is 10...
"Fuck You Twitter"
You know what? Just stop it. My lord. Here’s the deal: we don’t know what we’re doing, okay? We’re just getting killed over here and all of you just sit there and write long diatribes about how scaling Twitter is trivial or hard. After today we’ve had it up to about here with you people. Err users. Customers? WTF. Well, we’ve been loving Summize as of...
Tuesday morning randomness
We’d love to tell you that we know what happened this morning but we just plain don’t. This computer stuff is hard.
What we do know is that certain users are only seeing limited updates. Here’s what we’re going to do to try and track down the problem:
Do a little dance.
Make a little love.
Get down tonight.
Oh wait. That’s not going to do it. Shit. Okay,...
June 2008
11 posts
Monday afternoon downtime
Are you sensing a theme here? That’s right. We’re hating life again.
One thing that would really help us right now is if folks would just login to Twitter and then refresh your page a few times. Really fast. Not.
We’re seeing slowness again this afternoon that we’ve traced back to our ineptitude at running a “major” Internet service. I put...
Monday morning downtime
We effectively have two catch alls when it comes to problems here at Twitter; database and load balancer. This morning, our “load balancer” was “overloaded” and we had a few “hung” machines. Honestly, we’re amazed the Internet stays up as it does considering we can’t get a Linux box to function for more than 8 hours without it seizing up. Ya gotta...
Saturday night downtime
Fuckin’ A people. We had another “database problem”. This is kind of a catch all for us now. This time it was because somebody thought they were in the right terminal window when they typed “kill -9 -1” to shutdown their machine. Seriously? I know I hate typing “shutdown” too but pa-leeze people. The ensuing chaos and subsequent downtime led to a...
Outage today between 2:30pm and whenever
@al3x met this chic last night that said she could “tweak the crystals” enough to make the site faster. Whatever, we’re endulging him/her. She’s got the con at 2:30pm and we’re hoping she can figure this shit out. What a mess.
Hope you didn’t need the site this afternoon. Here’s to crossing your fingers!!
Good Morning Twitterverse!
You know what we did last night to make Twitter better? Nothing!! That’s right. Between the late nights of drinking, all of our adoring fans and the rest of you suckers that put up with our abuse, we decided to take it easy last night. Its been a long week for us!
This weekend we might bring back replies. If we feel like it. We were kind of pissed at how all of you have been dissing...
Turning @replies back off
Just stop it you smarmy bastards. Putting the timestamps in the posts like @bradfitz. You should be ashamed of yourselves. We’re slaving away over here trying to make things better and all you people do is pout about it.
You know what? We’re just gonna leave the @replies off while we “work on the stability of this feature”. Keep messing with us. Just keep it up and...
Friday Afternoon: one more thing
Okay, so the service is stabilizing. We think this has to do with the rapidly approaching Happy Hour across the West Coast. Or people are finally pissed off at us (just kidding; you suckers will never leave us no matter how we abuse you!).
Oh, and to the guy at the coffee place: no, Twitter is not like third-world power grids. We stay up. Our uptime is stupidly high right now. You can’t...
@Replies are back
Fuckin’ A you people bitch a lot. Look, we just raised a bunch of money, we’ve had some photographers coming in and out all day. We’re pretty busy over here. Sorry you can’t have your precious replies.
If you’re lucky we’ll keep the service up this weekend and maybe answer our pagers (get it? Its a joke. WTF is a pager?!)
What a day!
Phew. Its been another long day in the salt mines. We’ve been busy reading all of this glowing press about how awesome we are (Jeff Bezos is a lot nicer in person than you’d think). Sites slow as shit again but fuck it; we’re rich you suckers!! We’ll check on things later this weekend once we’ve emerged from this impending hangover.
Friday Morning
We’re currently experiencing massive slowness and downtime across the web site. Our data center has been notified and is looking into it.
Update (9:53a): Our load balancer is overloaded. We’re working to bring web machines back up to service requests now. You’ll be seeing whales for a bit.
Update (10:20a): Web services are coming back online and we’re starting to serve timelines again.
Thursday Morning
This morning we’re seeing slow page loads and many a whale. We’re deploying several fixes soon which we believe will alleviate the more onerous queries and will allow us to bring back the replies tab. Update: While we work on this problem, replies will be disabled via the API as well as on the web.