Tag: ‘fail’
Social networking apocalypse
Photo by ronin691
Today Twitter failed dramatically. Not the typical failure which the public is historically very forgiving of, but a failure with a difference. A failure without a Fail Whale. I don’t think TheTAPIR need inform you, dear reader, of the severity of that situation. The sedate and comforting white mammal with its expression of almost divine tranquility, held aloft by tiny red emotionless slavebirds is the one thing that calms the screaming masses, and prevents them from realising that Twitter is not the tiny one-man-company-in-a-shed that it tries to give the impression of being. In fact, Twitter is now a huge monster of a business, and its inability to keep what is essentially a large collection of RSS feeds consistently available has only so much time before it stops being cute, and starts being an irritating and terrible sign of obvious mass ineptitude.
Frantic checking of the Twitter status page revealed “We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.” This is tech-speak for “We have no idea what is going on”. This was later updated to “we are defending against a denial-of-service attack” which Twitter is still recovering from. At the time of writing, Spymaster is still failing to successfully authenticate to Twitter, and we are trying very hard to pretend we don’t care.
Panicking social media gluttons rushed, pulses racing, to Facebook, which was also deluged with AJAX timeouts and errors (possibly for this very reason). Unable to tell the universe what kind of bagel they were eating, that they were brushing their teeth or that they were having a good/bad hair day, the Internet fell into a deep dark gloom some might describe as the end of days.
Of course, no-one considered taking this opportunity to actually do some work.
Evan Williams takes time to respond to Hacker Croll (but not to fix Twitter)
Photo by jdlasica
In May, someone who calls themselves Hacker Croll hacked Twitter, and gained access to various email accounts and credit card details. Williams stated that none of the attacks actually managed to target twitter.com, nor were any of the user accounts compromised. He said (courtesy of TechCrunch) “[...]most of the sensitive information was personal rather than company-related. Obviously, this was highly distressing to myself, my wife, and other Twitter employees who were attacked.”
Of course, we all know what he says to be true, since Twitter always sabotages itself long before staying operational long enough for anyone to have a chance of successfully targeting it.