this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Musk claims there was a DDOS attack on X — but The Verge is told there was not.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

Its probably fairly straightforward:

Their new format and infrastructure for video hosting was not properly tested, and they did not expect the amount of bandwidth needed to support viewership demand.

Basically, same thing as a modern AAA live service game launch.

It probably isn't a DDOS. Its probably just... a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Except with a modern AAA game, they have an understanding on how things work. This clown doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Oh, my sweet child, no they don't xP

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean, the devs and server techs know what's going on, its the execs and middle managers that need to get a live service on a shoestring budged to make the shareholders happy that you made them 25% more profit than last quarter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well that's the thing: they would need to hire actual server devs and techs in order to have somebody who knows what's going on.

Having done both sides, I can tell you that front-end development in gamedev does not in any way form or shape prepare somebody for designing good backends at any level (code or systems architecture), designing multi-tiered systems or even to just design good comms protocols - they're pretty much opposite sides of development, and not just in a physical or systems structure sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean, you're not wrong but I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Yeah front end and backend development are very different skillets, but my point is the people working and coding and making the game generally do actually know what they're doing, but its middle managers are given orders from on high by execs, most of whom probably haven't touched a video game ever in their lives, keeping the board of directors happy with quarterly profit increases.

I wasn't talking about the horizontal divide between front end and back end devs, but the vertical divide between management/executives and the devs and techs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I agree with you.

My point is that it's not uncommon for the higher ups (and even middle management) to think that making games is making the fancy stuff you see on the screen and not understand that as soon as it involves networking it's a whole different ball game with a different skill set and considerations: due to thinking that "games developers" should be able to do the whole "game thing" (which in a game with networking is not just frontend but also backend) they won't hire the people who "work and code" backend stuff and hence know how to do the backend.

In fact in my experience even the people who "work and code" frontend stuff tend to, until they actually try doing it, underestimate the difficulty of backend development and differences between that and what they do, hence overestimate their capability to do it.

The point being that they might not have the people who "work and code" in that specific domain because they didn't saw the need for different specialists than the ones they already had hence never hired them in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I see, so the angle you're going for is that basically hiring practices don't prioritize the skills needed for backend and think frontend devs can handle full stack. Even then the front-end teams do know that the backend stuff is important even if they don't have a full understanding of the scope of complexity that goes into the nitty gritty of backend dev.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I enjoyed this way more than I probably should have lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You really think an AAA game isn't more capable than a platform owned and run by Musk? They guy who fired everyone that would make sure shit like that worked. Come on man, the sweet child comment is cute but you're comparing New York City to some bumfuck town in Indiana.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Having been a player of "triple A" games for a loooong time, they are shoddy at best and appallingly broken at worst (see especially: on launch, immediately after a successor is released). I haven't seen a decent game launch that wasn't indie in over a decade, and I'll only be quiet about it when even one game from a big name publisher doesn't suck hairy donkey balls.

It's all about the profits, baby. Squeeze those pennies until they bleed. Buggy games, horribly inadequate servers, mass-banning players automatically and inaccurately, cheaters galore; doesn't matter as long as profits go up. The CEO of EA or Ubi or whatever is no better, don't get it twisted.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I am remembering a lot of AAA games in the past two years that have launched and basically been unplayable for a day to two weeks due to some kind of combination of not enough servers, garbage netcode, or other game breaking bugs.

Elon just went to a different clown college.

A mandatory class at both AAA game dev flavored clown college and blood diamond mines flavored clown college seems to be the art of talking up a whole lot of cool innovative features and then going hugely over budget and development time and then cutting most of those features for a late delivery date.

(And no, I don't care if the devs are good at their jobs but management fucked them! is the defense for AAA games. Sure, maybe that's correct on an internal level. Doesn't really matter for a consumable product. Would be nice if the idiot asshats got laughed out of the industry instead of new car collections, golden parachutes, but thats a whole 'nother discussion)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

how many russian twitter bots in one place does it take to crash twitter?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

probably not very many because it only took a single psychotic new owner to do that when he started pulling servers out of a sacramento data center a couple years back, with no engineering and no planning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I am still hopeful the Twitter HQ will become a homeless shelter one way or another: Looks like Musky boy just hasn't been paying rent, so, fingers crossed.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I remember a year back they just turned "off" their microservice architechture (Musk: "Why are we burning so much money in this microservice?"), or the part which allows for autoscaling as per incoming load. So the servers just reached 100% utilization and crashed.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Its probably just... a distributed amount of viewers requesting more bandwidth than they expected/knew how to serve.

So a Group Hug of Death.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Xhitters full. Don't light a match or it will blow - it sucks though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

So they’re applying the Tesla method to Twitter now