Embedded: Twitter puts outage
Hide and seek. Did I scare you?
Earlier this week, Twitter went down. It went down hard. It was scary. I know because I was there. I now officially have the PTSD. At last, I’m finally somebody.
The duration of the outage was about 45 minutes. That’s approximately twice the amount of time Apollo 13 spent out of radio contact when it was behind the moon. I just got a double dose of what it must have felt like to be in Mission Control. And I’m a non-smoker!
It was the longest outage since Twitter’s IPO and the second crash in the last nine days.
The outage was described in the strongest possible terms as the “longest outage since the IPO.” What those two things have to do with each other I have absolutely no idea.
Some in the media took the opportunity to write quippish jokes about the mayhem. (Hint: It was too soon.) Jokes, I must say, that practically wrote themselves.
- “Twitter Suffers Outage During Biz Stone’s Panel at SXSW” – I don’t know what a “Biz Stone” is but I bet it was pissed. Source: WSJ.
- “Twitter Outage Takes Site Down for 45 Minutes, Users Stranded” – I bet a lot of them were forced to hitchhike. Source: Newsmax.com.
- “Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue” – What the fuck are you implying? Source: Washington Post.
- “‘We Experienced Unexpected Complications’: The Language Of Twitter Outages” – Hey, that’s the hip new lingo. Source: Lifehacker Australia.
- “Twitter Goes Down: Something is Technically Wrong” – You have a firm grasp of the obvious. Souce: The Next Web.
- “Twitter Briefly Goes Down, Silencing Millions Of Horrible, Unnecessary Twitter Jokes” – That hurts, that really hurts. Source: Huffington Post.
Again, as your intrepid embedded reporter, I was there on the front lines. What follows are my eyewitness firsthand accounts of the action as it unfolded.
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Sexism? Yahoo!
Yesterday, during my exclusive coverage of the Yahoo baby flap, I neglected to cover a key point. So exclusive team coverage continues today. Besides, most of you didn’t even notice I posted. Perhaps if I cover the same topic two days in a row I’ll have a shot.
This week, Yahoo announced the selection of their new CEO. Marissa Mayer, a long-time Yahoo employee, takes over with a compensation package that will reportedly pay her more than $100 million over five years based on performance.
Marissa takes over as CEO of the troubled company and fills the position vacated recently by former Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. In January 2012 Thompson became the CEO. By May 2012, Thompson was shown the door after questions were raised about discrepancies on the resume he provided. On the resume was a computer degree that Thompson did not actually have.
In other words, he lied. Or in modern parlance, he “padded his resume.” Or, for the cutsey among you, “resume malfunction.”
The reaction from Wall Street was interesting.
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Oh noes, gubment is out to get us
Today’s misleading headline comes to us from the good folks at CBS News who tell us:
TSA to Block “Controversial Opinion” on the Web
Yikes! This raises so many questions like: Is free speech brewing terrorism on the net? Why else would the TSA of all things be involved in something like this? What I mean is that the Transportation Safety Administration is tasked with security for all modes of transportation. This must be something extremely serious for them to be involved, right?
Actually read the story, though, and one just might come away with a slightly different interpretation.
You see, the story is actually about TSA computers, not the “web.” Computers that are supposed to be used by TSA employees in the performance of their job duties, you know, doing things to make transportation safe and stuff.
And the “controversial opinion” that TSA employees will be blocked from? (Check out those quotation marks in action, used for dramatic effect, to make things sound so chilling.) One example is that employees will be blocked from playing online games.
Wow. That is chilling. Oops, please excuse me. I just accidentally snorted some Jack Daniels up my nose.
TSA employees will also be blocked from other things like criminal activity, extreme violence, chat/messaging, and yes, even the aforementioned “controversial opinion.”
In other words, they’ll probably have to spend more time doing their jobs. We can only hope that surfing porn (like they do at the SEC) will fall under one of those broad (no pun intended) categories.
So here’s a tip of the hat to CBS News and their attempt to sensationalize their headline to induce clicks. It certainly worked on me.
Shouts from the Abyss 
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