Tag: ‘panic’
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.
Jeremy Keith causes alpen hysteria
Photo by wasabicube
There was a threat today that Jeremy Keith would tweet about something other than eating toast. Panic spread across the Internet as Keith mentioned the muesli he had had that morning, but things quickly returned to normal with a tweet on the merits of butter vs margerine, and the threat level has been reduced back down to yellow breakfast alert.