Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/10/08/twitters-t-co-is-currently-down-meaning-all-links-shortened-by-the-social-network-are-not-working/?utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_campaign=social%20media&awesm=tnw.to_l5M0&utm_source=Twitter

by psobot • 14 years ago

77 48 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

mopoke• 14 years ago

Looks like a DNS failure, so adding 199.59.148.12 to your hosts file gives you working t.co links again.

generj• 14 years ago

I'm sure someone is having an interesting conversation right now. Twitter needs to stop having these embarrassing down-ages if they want to be a permanent player in the tech field.

beagle32• 14 years ago

They've had them all along. Didn't stop them from getting to where they are. Why should they start caring now? From a cost/benefit perspective, it is probably not worth it to them to do whatever is needed to have a six nines uptime.

x53152• 14 years ago

We care. We're working on it.

paulgb• 14 years ago

They had so much downtime in the early days that their 500 page became a meme http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/

jmathai• 14 years ago

Thankfully the Internet has a pretty short term memory.

panacea• 14 years ago

And nothing of value... /snark

dm8• 14 years ago

I find my Twitter useless now (although I can still copy links). It's amazing to see how Twitter has become my information/discovery network. I use Facebook just to browse pictures and other casual stuff shared by my friends/family.

Twitter can kill Flipboard and other tons of "discovery engines" with one flip. I think Twitter has figured out this stuff couple of years back and that's what they are doing. A real-time discovery network. It is more powerful than any of the existing old mediums, be it newspapers or TV networks.

EDIT: It also makes extremely powerful advertising medium.

farms• 14 years ago

It's also listed in Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co - so it could be someone's filter going nuts over that.

Funny recommendation there:

"If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request."

arcatek• 14 years ago

When a HN twitter bot has tweeted this story, I actually clicked on the link.

Genius.

Mithrandir• 14 years ago

Seems to be back up: https://t.co/uHJO6BCr

mdonahoe• 14 years ago

Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener?

How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down?

It's a centralized service, things happen.

joebadmo• 14 years ago

Which is why we shouldn't use centralized services like Twitter. I'm rooting for http://tent.io/ myself.

digitalengineer• 14 years ago

However, if someone places a shortened url via tent you'd still not be able to click the link if the shorten-service is down.

lloeki2• 14 years ago

> Am I supposed to be mad at twitter for forcing me to use their unreliable link shortener?

Yes.

> How is this any different from the countless times twitter.com was down?

This is different because if I read a tweet cached in my client or archived somewhere I can't reach an external resource because a middleman is down.

> It's a centralized service, things happen.

The WWW is decentralized by design. Link shorteners, and reliance on them, make it obnoxiously centralized. The tweet itself should contain the full link and shorten it only on display [0] [1].

[0] https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783814

[1] https://alpha.app.net/marco/post/783881

gjulianm2• 14 years ago

Actually...

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-entities

The tweet response contains the full link.

mseebach3• 14 years ago

I can see how Twitters length-limit led to external link shorteners, but once they took it in-house, why expose it? Why not just say that a link (of any length) "costs" n characters, and handle the shortening/expansion on the backend? What is the benefit of exposing the mechanism?

brian_cloutier• 14 years ago

If you're a regular user it's not exposed. Links are shown with their full url on the site and the user is usually redirected before tthey have a chance to notice they're being sent through t.co

mseebach3• 14 years ago

It is very much exposed: The regular user can't click on links on Twitter because it's down.

justincormack• 14 years ago

I am a regular user but mostly on mobile. Often I give up on links as it gets stuck loading t.co and I notice constantly.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Backwards compatibility.

mseebach3• 14 years ago

It could be as simple as a flag on the API: Do you want shortened links and a guarantee that the message is less than 140 characters, or full link, with a risk that it will "spill over". As most (all?) clients expand links anyway, they'd be choosing the latter.

kcl3• 14 years ago

Twitter wants to route links through their servers for at least two reasons:

  1. Analytics and monitoring. (Google's results page uses the same technique.)
  2. Disabling malicious and unwanted links.

guelo3• 14 years ago

Google search does not use the same technique.

kapitalx• 14 years ago

On the google note, their URL redirects have dramatically slowed down my experience. They seems to have a very slow redirect.

avallark• 14 years ago

Its surprising to see that thenextweb has written such a long article about t.co being down.

i guess its easy to write up stuff :))

stevewilhelm• 14 years ago

For most Twitter's users, it is not a mission critical service.

It could be regularly down for hours at a time with little to no effect.

They'll just come back later.

chumpZero• 14 years ago

I dont think its controlling satellites - its twitter...everybody chill

jqueryin• 14 years ago

Internal sources say t.co went down due to registrar error, which is highly unfortunate for Twitter as this was something out of their control.

tomflack• 14 years ago

Related: OSX twitter integration seems broken for me? I can't tweet from Safari or other apps.

Twitter's mandatory link shortener, t.co, was down

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