[roboyoshi]

In case people are wondering what this is about: All links and images are not working on twitter right now. Seems like they accidentally included their own services in the api blocklist? Sending best of luck to the engineers. The whole twitter saga has given me a good chunk of valuable "lesson learned" over the last weeks and months.. so thanks for that.

[Tostino]

For someone who has tried to avoid hearing as much as possible about this drama (and didn't notice this was about Twitter until looking at the comments), what are the condensed "lesson learned" takeaways if you don't mind elaborating?

[CameronNemo]

Don't fire or alienate hordes of engineers with firm-specific talent. Especially for a product/service as mature as Twitter.

[MrOwnPut]

The lesson is if Elon runs Twitter, an hour long downtime takes up everyone's day so we can all speculate.

Before, it was "healthy for everyone" when Twitter went down (search hn.algolia.com for pre-Elon Twitter downtime threads)

Now it's an episode of Real Housewives just like any other Elon thread on HN.

[roboyoshi]

- When you fire a lot of engineers, legal, security experts... things will still somehow keep working - Also some people still want to keep working at this place (or must, because of VISA etc); It probably happens all the time, just this time everyone was watching it in full motion. - I was sure this whole takeover was the end of twitter, but somehow with how many users twitter has, it just won't die. Goes to show the advantages of the mass.. probably the same applies to microsoft/google.. - The whole 8$ for a checkmark story.. which destroyed the whole trust in the checkmark basically immediately. The whole verification process (how that worked) - many people shared some insights on that and how much effort it was to fine-tune all of that with the scale of twitter. - The free API just being shut down with basically zero communication to devs. and somehow getting away with it. I guess this is a reoccuring theme in tech that a small company has to be open for developers until it's big enough to turn on them. - With the reduced engineering and the new management, it seems more errors slip into production (and incidents like the one now) - or maybe it just feels like it with all the focus on twitter right now - but anyways, you just see things breaking you normally would not expect to see.. - How people are communicating, or in this case not communicating.

I'm probably not the ideal person to write this down, there was so much stuff going on, some people probably made a whole blog-article series on this. This is just a few of the things that I'm able to remember right now.. and with everything on hn here it gives you some ideas and things to think about. Hope that Helps.

[coliveira]

Maybe mister "genius" is working his magic by annoying as many people as he can and making Twitter visibly worse before it is finally great again! So people will finally be amazed at how "genius" he really is.

[banannaise]

Seems likely that they used an allowlist rather than a blocklist for the API restriction, and left several critical services out of the allowlist.

[shadowgovt]

> Sending best of luck to the engineers.

... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.

[echelon]

Why would you stay at Twitter? Even if you believe in the platform and the mission, this has to be one of the most stressful work environments in tech right now.

The only cases I can think of for staying:

- Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!)

- A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck to paycheck, haven't interviewed in awhile, imposter syndrome... (If you're worried you'd not be able to get hired, instead ask why you weren't fired.)

[secondcoming]

Everything seems fine for me when I use the main website.

[orra]

Are you logged in? Twitter seems to be working normally (i.e. it refreshes) where I'm logged into the browser. But where I'm not, I get the error message everybody's seeing.

[tsimionescu]

Same for me, but accessing Twitter links from Google breaks it.

Seems to be related to a query param in my case (if I remove the ?lang=en, the page loads properly).

[almog]

Perhaps it's region specific but I get 467 errors right now for images on both mobile android and desktop web.

[meowtimemania]

I see the issue on iOS

[mikeyouse]

No new links or images work for me from the main website. Cached stuff seems okay.

[rcme]

A lot of people are on H1Bs that don't have the luxury of quitting without solid work lined up. It's also not a great time to be looking for a job.

[mandeepj]

> Honestly, I'd just quit right now and pour myself an extra-large drink. It would feel amazing after this much abuse.

Unfortunately, there are his blind followers trying to emulate him. Not sure what havoc they are planning to unleash on their employees.

https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff-elon-musk-ceos-...

paywall-less link - https://archive.ph/HbC3k

[WalterSear]

I wonder how many are on H1s?

[systemvoltage]

Do you just have a gut feeling that they are being abused? I thought the crowd that didn't like working there, left.