Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!
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Earlier in the year you may remember Twitter “accidentally” deleting a large portion of a majority of their users’ followers and having to spend days restoring those from tape backup due to their mishap. Well, it would appear that Twitter has done it again. This time may not be as obvious to users.
On SocialToo.com I was noticing we were getting “Rate Limit Exceeded” errors for our whitelisted @socialtoo user. Such errors shouldn’t be happening for whitelisted users so I looked into it. Sure enough, on the Twitter development mailing list I noticed an email from the founder of MrTweet, Yu-Shan Fung, stating they too were seeing the same issue with their @mrtweet whitelited user.
Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead, confirmed the issue, stating, “It looks like some database maintenance inadvertently truncated our table of whitelisted users.” He then continued in a follow-up e-mail making the problem seem worse: ‘The updated estimate I’ve just received from our ops guys is “more
than 15 minutes and less than 12 hours”. They have to restore from a
nightly database backup. Said backups are quite large, and take some
time to get through.’ It would appear that Twitter has inadvertently deleted an entire table of all the whitelisted users - this is the table that enables many of the Twitter Apps you use to continue to talk to the API without breaking. This is what we as developers are relying on to work or our Apps go down.
It was the exact issue of database deletion and insecurity of Twitter being competent enough to not do it again that caused me to go on hiatus from Twitter earlier in the year. Problems like deleting an entire table from a database, especially twice in a year, are inexcusable Twitter! I recommend finding someone that can ensure this doesn’t happen again. It’s time to upgrade your Operations team. As developers, we simply can’t rely on this, and it’s why I called my service SocialToo and not TwitterToo.
In the meantime, many of the Twitter services you use until this gets resolved may have issues. This includes SocialToo.com autofollow being down until the table in the Twitter database is up again. I’ll keep you updated on the @socialtoo Twitter account when this comes up again.
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Jesse consults with his business, Stay N' Alive Productions, LLC, and runs a social relationship management company called 
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whitelisted developers and not really followers. It's the same concept
though - a DBA at Twitter accidentally deleting data from their database.
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through to defend Twitter, despite all its problems - and I'm curious why
you're trying to remain anonymous here. As a business trying to make money
off this stuff I have every right to demand that Twitter remain reliable.
When Twitter goes down like in this instance, so does my business. I don't
care if their code has bugs in it - so long as they're going to be allowing
access to an API like this they have a responsibility to protect data and
ensure the service is reliable.
Bugs or no bugs, DBAs "accidentally" deleting entire tables in a database is
inexcusable. At every reputable place I've worked at you can lose your job
over mistakes like that. One time would be one thing, but twice (and I
argue this isn't even the second time this has happened - I remember it
happening several times before) shows you have a problem with your DBAs.
Something needs to be fixed, and I have every right as a business user of
Twitter to demand that. Deleting tables in the database seems to be a very
common occurrence at Twitter - it's inexcusable.
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"As a business trying to make money off this stuff I have every right to demand that Twitter remain reliable."
No. You don't. If you paid for access to the Twitter API, then yes, you would have a voice. But you don't. You pretty much mooch off of the hard work the Twitter folks do to keep the service up and running for everyone and then expect them to bend over backwards for you. Twitter has no "responsibility" to you simply because you've chosen to leach off their service.
Now, is it a bad thing Twitter deleted these tables? You bet it is. All I'm trying to get across is that mistakes happen. Provided Twitter fixes the problem in a timely manner (15 minutes to 12 hours seems timely to me), then I'm OK with that. If Twitter refused to acknowledge the problem, or in any other way tried to deflect responsibility for causing the problem I wouldn't be taking this stance. But from what you've posted, it sounds as if they have been pretty darned open about it.
Furthermore, put yourself in Twitter's shoes. From what I'm seeing, you are not running any kind of service that's comparable in size to what Twitter is. Things change A LOT when things get big. Things happen that you simply cannot anticipate and I suspect this is one of those.
Lastly - I choose to be anonymous because this is the internet, afterall. I am simply not comfortable providing any real information about myself in a public space. I don't go about in public spewing my private information, and I don't do it on the internet, either. Simple as that.
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I wish they would so I could hold them more responsible. Until then I can
only blog about it.
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