Twitter’s Weirdo Error Page Is All Tumblr Can Talk About

Steve Huff — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:22:03 -0400

Twitter's big Thursday afternoon crash (ongoing for us as of 1:20 p.m. EDT) produced a weird landing page that sent Tumblr users into a screencapping frenzy, in part because unless you've programmed in or studied Ruby on Rails, the programming language upon which Twitter was originally built, you probably won't recognize blank Ruby variables like "<%= reason %>" or "<%= deadline %>."

Reactions ranged from Debby in Germany, who took the opportunity to abuse Twitter with profanity:

To Thom Stoodley, who proposed an explanation for the outage:

Then there were those who seemed resigned but resentful, like Tumblrer sarahsamudre, who capped the strange landing page and simply wrote, "I want to use <%=reason %> as my excuse for things."

The despairing and Twitterless masses also took their wailing and gnashing of teeth to Facebook timelines:

Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke's Facebook response was particularly eloquent, as if the vox populi on both Tumblr and Facebook were momentarily channeled through him and him alone:

So say we all, Mr. Huppke.

Twitter is Down: This is Not a Drill

Jessica Roy — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:06:01 -0400

(Photo: Twitter)

It appears that the Internet is greatly enjoying fucking with us today. Earlier this morning, Gchat experienced an outage, and as of 20 minutes ago, Twitter went dead. Strangely, obsessively refreshing does not fix the problem, and yields only a sad "This webpage is not available" message from our browser of choice (Chrome, duh).

The Twitter Status blog updated 19 minutes ago with the following message:

Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

Seven users have somehow managed to tweet this message, through a method we can only describe as black magic.

UPDATE:

Well this explains everything:

Ohhhh, it's down because of % = reason. We should've known!

But seriously we have no idea what this means, so we checked with our engineer boyfriend: "That's a borked Ruby message," he replied. Still confused! But we fear it looks a lot more serious than the cute little fail whale.

Update 2:

A rep for Twitter told us they're aware of the issues and are looking into it. Meanwhile, the site appears to be back up for some users? Cue angry meta tweets about not being able to tweet angry meta things.

Betabeat » this sucks

Twitter’s Weirdo Error Page Is All Tumblr Can Talk About

Twitter is Down: This is Not a Drill