Mastodawn

Sheldon Jul 1, 2023

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

Sheldon Jul 1, 2023

Lest anyone doubt that Twitter was idiotic enough to release code that would cause a race condition and result in its own users executing a DDOS attack on it, here's the network console readout from Firefox showing all the network requests blasting away.

Of course I immediately closed out my connection because I'm a good person.

...but wait! It's the weekend and Evil Sheldon is in control so I kept the party going for a while since Twitter insisted on it.

#TwitterDown #Twitter #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

Andres Jalinton Jul 1, 2023

@sysop408
It's kind of sad and really telling of what is going on behind the frontend, overworked engineers trying to meet the demands of an idiotic owner.

robotman Jul 1, 2023

@Andres yeah and almost certainly this has something to do with them shutting off anonymous access to Twitter content.

There must have been an insane nest of logic that the devs had to tiptoe through to make the service workable as a private only service.

I presume that the Twitter client didn't anticipate the possibility that Twitter has zero content for it... or maybe someone decided to push to production, pack up, and walk out the door in a blaze of glory.

CosmoStephan Jul 1, 2023

@sysop408 @Andres My suspicion is that because they stopped paying their Google server bills, they now are lacking on servers, wanted to limit the amount of traffic and calls, and voila - killed Twitter all by themselves.

Andres Jalinton Jul 1, 2023

@CosmoStephan @sysop408
That is for sure part of it.

LeftInTexas Jul 1, 2023

@CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres

I think that could be part of it. But I think the big reason is because they made using the API so expensive that a bunch of people switched over to scraping. The thousands and thousands of bots scraping every single tweet must have caused them some major headaches.

Francis ☑️Jul 2, 2023

@LeftInTexas @CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres that seems like the most likely explanation for blocking anonymous access

Mario Jul 2, 2023

@LeftInTexas @CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres Then why not restrict single user access to X requests per minute, instead of restricting normal user interactions? My money's on the not paying google theory

Fluffy 🦊Jul 1, 2023

@CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres pretty much, considering that their GCloud contract expires today: https://theconversation.com/twitter-is-refusing-to-pay-google-for-cloud-services-heres-why-it-matters-and-what-the-fallout-could-be-for-users-207718

Twitter is refusing to pay Google for cloud services. Here’s why it matters, and what the fallout could be for users

Cloud computing is a way for businesses to access extra computational resources over the internet. Without it, the internet as we know it would malfunction.

The Conversation

Fluffy 🦊Jul 2, 2023

@CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres never mind, it's "supposedly" paid: https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/110641214939021782

msgbi Jul 2, 2023

@fluffyanthro007 @CosmoStephan @sysop408 @Andres @charles_ex

Nia Molinari Jul 1, 2023

@sysop408 @Andres

https://toad.social/@NiaMolinari/110640814186705166

Nia Molinari (@[email protected])

Fwiw, if any journalists etc need to find anything on the bird, for some reason because my account is permanently suspended in read only mode, I'm not affected by wtf ever it is that space karen is doing, so I can find it if needed. That's all. #birdsite #twitter #twittermigration

toad.social

Andres Jalinton Jul 1, 2023

@NiaMolinari @sysop408
@NiaMolinari
That is genius.

Nia Molinari Jul 1, 2023

@Andres @sysop408 😂

remocracy Jul 2, 2023

@sysop408 @Andres Could be possible, I bet all the competent staff quit or got fired

JojoTheWolfBoy Jul 3, 2023

@sysop408 @Andres This is why I always put some kind of existence check in my code. Never assume something is there unless you created it to begin with.