The Twitter app just went very, very strange

3 years ago by stopthatgirl7 to c/technology

Twitter has broken after seemingly being hit by an unusual bug.

hogunner 124 points 3 years ago

“Unusual bug” is a polite way of describing Elon.

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residentmarchant 12 points 3 years ago

Peculiar Grub

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ryan 77 points 3 years ago

It doesn't seem to be broken. This article gave no screenshots, only a million ads, so I searched up reddit. Yeah, there's some minor visual glitches. The dates have been epoch'd for some people.

It's indicative of Twitter's services slowly breaking down as the engineers left either don't know how to manage everything or simply don't have time to, but what else is new?

This article is pretty sensational for what is the continuing sad decline of an app which was probably a detriment to humanity overall, but which spawned some funny jokes and was occasionally a means of mass communication in times of crisis.

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Appoxo 4 points 3 years ago

means of mass communication in times of crisis.
So many emergency and customer service accounts there. I didn't need them so far but they surely would come in handy once I'd actually need them :(

Also a good way to follow japanese based accounts since many either block non-domestic traffic/sales on their websites or are otherwise hard to get hold on as a foreigner for news/services.

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dhork 74 points 3 years ago

The unusual date is seemingly a consequence of the so-called Unix epoch.

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grue 24 points 3 years ago

Did Y2038 come early?

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bjoern_tantau 7 points 3 years ago

I've already had to deal with Y2038 bugs about 15 years ago. Cookies in PHP couldn't (and I think still can't) be set with an expiration date beyond the end of Unix time.

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squaresinger 1 point 3 years ago

They are using 31-bit signed integers.

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Fisk400 35 points 3 years ago

It's fine. It's just Elon gnawing on wires in the basement of twitter HQ.

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long_chicken_boat 9 points 3 years ago

someone needs to make this in stable diffusion. a rat with elon's face gnawing on wires.

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AzureRT 4 points 3 years ago

God, I hope someone actually does this

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olicvb 14 points 3 years ago

Made these real quick

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squaresinger 4 points 3 years ago

The top one isn't a rat, but it's perfect!

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CmdrShepard 4 points 3 years ago

The mental image of this is hilarious. I picture them finally finding him, shining a flashlight in his face, and then he screeches and tunnels further under the floor.

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FarceMultiplier 27 points 3 years ago

I hear it was the South African Shitbeetle.

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Burn_The_Right 5 points 3 years ago

A shitbeetle's gotta shit, Randy.

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iAvicenna 17 points 3 years ago

Unusual bug: believing that you can run a company after firing 2/3 of the employees and because whoever remains has superpowers

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Very_Bad_Janet 13 points 3 years ago

I can't wait to tie my entire financial life to X.

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Everythingispenguins 13 points 3 years ago

Elon needs to just admit to being the embodiment of the fail whale

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dangblingus 11 points 3 years ago

Slowly killing the platform on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government going well.

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AlternateRoute 8 points 3 years ago

Guess no one remembers the fail whale

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autotldr 7 points 3 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Tracking website Down Detector saw a huge surge in reports of problems on Tuesday afternoon UK time.

Many computers do not count time in the usual way, but instead register it as the number of seconds that have amassed since 1 January 1970, which is called the Unix epoch.

But it also means that any problems with that code can lead to confusion, since they will often make it appear as if something happened 50 years ago.

Even users who could see those posts saw the tweets as empty or not showing properly, however, suggesting that the issue was more widespread than just a problem with the time.

Users also reported that retweets appeared to broken, showing instead as “RT” alongside the post they had tried to share.

The problems come almost exactly a year after Elon Musk bought Twitter, a deal that was closed on 27 October, 2022.

The original article contains 309 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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TheLonelyWonderer 3 points 3 years ago

You mean it wasn't already?

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PrincessLeiasCat 3 points 3 years ago

It’s a feature, not a bug.

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