X has stopped working

[u/Well_Socialized]

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/x-down-twitter-not-working-status-b2902008.html

[u/TheTeamDad]

But how is PatriotLady4547USANumberOne in Nigeria going to get paid today for posting rage bait?

[u/Foofity → u/TheTeamDad]

I’m going to need you to keep my name out of your mouth

[u/lardparty → u/TheTeamDad]

They still have Facebook don't worry

[u/Trajan-]

Verizon yesterday. X today. 🤔

[u/TheSilentFarm → u/Trajan-]

Microsoft azure had issues 2-4 days ago which took down our application website. And today something else broke that took down something else of ours.

Just a month or so ago on a personal level apple TV and everything was busted. I've not had issues this rapidly across the internet from multiple locations before so it's been a bit of a ride.

[u/No_Hetero → u/TheSilentFarm]

I'm betting a lot of lower level tech roles are now AI and that's part of the problem. I have a theory about the Verizon outage being related to their recent favorable ruling about making it harder to unlock phones to switch carriers, though, and in the process of making some related changes they fucked up their IMSI recognition.

Edit: to clarify, AI isn't successfully taking jobs, but I do think it's being pushed onto lower level techs to improve productivity without increasing compensation and their output isn't getting critical review, and the janitorial processes that keep our digital infrastructure from getting clogged with shit are no longer working because of that

[u/eaglebtc → u/No_Hetero]

Also, Verizon laid off 15,000 people a couple of months ago, right before the holidays. The outage might be the direct result of that. They probably had a network upgrade planned for mid-January anyway, when traffic is typically lighter on the network after the holidays, and not enough people checked it before implementation, or someone crucial to the project was no longer there.

[u/No_Hetero → u/eaglebtc]

The pattern points to general incompetence, probably both of us are right. News stories broke about their legal win keeping phones locked to the network that same day, and network locking relies on data encoded in the SIM, and most of the impacted people seemed to be on newer phones with esims and very few physical sims had outages, so that's why I'm leaning in that direction. That's the potential cause, but the mechanism of failure is probably all the other incompetence you bring up in their employment restructuring.

[u/Important-Agent2584 → u/No_Hetero]

• Consolidation -> fewer companies so when there is an outage more consumers are affected.

• Efficiency -> skeleton crews, automation, firing of old experienced hands for cheap new hires, the few players running everything using each others services to eliminate redundancy. Etc.

[u/iamthe0ther0ne → u/No_Hetero]

Fuck! THAT'S what happened? I'm paying $200/month for my Verizon phone because I live in Sweden but need to get US texts (no Google phone or alternatives here) plus I don't have the $600 to pay it off. The other day I went to an appointment somewhere I had never been, got lost, AND COULD NOT GET A GODDAMN SIGNAL. No Google maps, no way to call the appointment to ask for directions, and my Swedish isn't good enough for complicated things even when I'm not lost, late, and panicking. I gave up, but then couldn't get anywhere because your phone is your bus pass. I had to stop in a store and ask to use their wifi to call an uber. FUCK VERIZON.

Sorry. Thanks for letting me know. I guess it's time to spend a few hours on the phone with tech support.

[u/DJ_LeMahieu → u/No_Hetero]

The idea that jobs are being replaced by AI is mostly marketing lies spread by C-Suite statements to act like the layoffs over the last year are because of AI’s successes. It’s just not happening.

It’s really that we’re headed towards a recession and they’re trying to keep the bubble propped up with rhetoric.

[u/Caleth → u/DJ_LeMahieu]

It’s really that we’re headed towards a recession and they’re trying to keep the bubble propped up with rhetoric.

I wish it was only a recession. They've gutted everything that's keeping things going. It's just vapor bullshit making the market look good.

All the social safety nets that were put in place to keep things from getting too bad are under siege or ripped up. The attack on JPow at the fed is the real thing to watch. If he gets taken out the fed becomes a puppet and bends to Trumps demented wishes rather than reality and inflation shoots to Mars.

We're teed up for Weimar republic levels of economic devastation. Like African dictatorship levels of needing wheelbarrows to buy loafs of bread bad.

[u/frozenfade → u/Caleth]

I have a Zimbabwe currency note. 100 trillion dollar bill. Can't wait to have an American 100 trillion dollar bill hanging up next to it if I survive the collapse of America.

[u/Sea_Opening6341 → u/frozenfade]

I can't wait until the 1%'s money is just as worthless as ours

[u/01010101010100101 → u/DJ_LeMahieu]

and they spent too much money on AI, so cutbacks

[u/BootsnFlies → u/No_Hetero]

Yes, security gone to shit AND all our guarded secrets have been sold. 

[u/Forgotten_lostdreams → u/No_Hetero]

Could be or could be the fact the cyber terrorism groups at the FBI had their budgets cut.

[u/IM_OK_AMA → u/No_Hetero]

There's a lot of pressure to ship more quickly than we have in the past, and AI is capable of producing huge amounts of code in a very short time span.

These things combined means there is a lot of good-looking but poorly-reviewed code going out.

[u/Oceanbreeze871 → u/TheSilentFarm]

As all these companies do massive layoffs there’s nobody around to maintain stuff

[u/ilevelconcrete → u/Trajan-]

This mfer don’t know the rest of his life is going to be comprised of watching things that used to work perfectly fine break more and more often as the rich gain more and more power to plunder the resources meant to keep these things operating! 🫵😹💀

[u/beaumega1 → u/ilevelconcrete]

See: Social Security

[u/No_Hetero → u/beaumega1]

I ain't ever seeing a dime of that shit. I'll keep paying into it for the folks currently on it, though. Even if most of them were dumb enough to vote for exactly this situation.

[u/reasonably_plausible → u/No_Hetero]

I ain't ever seeing a dime of that shit

That's the lie that people want to push in order to make you okay with getting rid of it entirely. Even under insolvency, social security will be paying out 75% of benefits.

[u/MsMoreCowbell828 → u/reasonably_plausible]

Totally serious that I've been hearing about social security being insolvent "within 8 years" since I was a kid in the 70s. That it was impossible to not happen.

[u/Ok-Replacement9595 → u/MsMoreCowbell828]

Because ethe GOP has always hated it, and have run a decades long propaganda campaign against it, so that hedge funds and private equity can loot the coffers and bet with your retirement money without your consent.

[u/frozenfade → u/Ok-Replacement9595]

The thing I hate most about this is they always call it an "entitlement" as if it's a bad word. We fuckin paid into it, of course we are entitled to it.

[u/MapleYamCakes → u/reasonably_plausible]

Imagine we simply changed the law to remove the income cap for social security tax.

Elon stopped paying into the fund 13 seconds into 2026. The income limit is $184,500 this year.

[u/flindersrisk → u/MapleYamCakes]

Exactly. This is a ridiculously simple and FAIR fix. But somehow taking a dollar from people with oodles of dollars is not to be thought of.

[u/areaman86 → u/No_Hetero]

Just to be clear though, you will receive at least 78% of your benefits when you retire. Social Security is self-funded, the trust fund is running out but that is only a small fraction of the total program. Dooming on social security is propaganda that has been fed to us since Reagan to get younger people to see republicans dismantling it as just fine because “we’re not going to see a dime!”

[u/No_Zookeepergame_345 → u/areaman86]

And that 78% payout is assuming we do nothing to fix Social Security between now and the time we retire. The government tends to ignore things until they’re actively start impacting people.

[u/irespondwithmyface → u/No_Hetero]

Nope, you'll get Social Security. At worst, a reduced benefit, but you'll get it barring the collapse of the US.

It's right wing propaganda spreading lies that Social Security is failing because the right's goal is to privatize Social Security for profit.

[u/DinoDonkeyDoodle → u/No_Hetero]

Because it’s the right thing to do. Being an example of character that we so desperately need as a society right now. We are going to be left with trying to build something better or have nothing in a few years, I fear.

[u/Photomancer → u/ilevelconcrete]

"Why do we have so much 'tech debt'? Is there some way we can assign it to a subsidiary and just get rid of it?"

[u/Memoishi → u/Photomancer]

"Remember the guys you fired because their Github had red lines of codes instead of green ones? You're not gonna like it boss.."

[u/No-Arugula8881 → u/Photomancer]

“Why don’t we take all the tech debt, and push it over there?!” [Patrick points to India]

[u/fdsafdsa1232 → u/No-Arugula8881]

india: doubles debt and pushes it back over to U.S.

[u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA → u/fdsafdsa1232]

AKA "Doing the needful"

[u/browsk → u/ilevelconcrete]

Yep, we are going down the same path Russia did

[u/ilevelconcrete → u/browsk]

It’s literally the same people doing it here that did it over there. Ask Larry Summers!

[u/No-Drop924 → u/ilevelconcrete]

Have you seen Texas? Temp drops into the 50s, power grid goes down. Funny enough, the temp goes above 110, the power grid goes down.

[u/htownclyde → u/No-Drop924]

You undercook fish? Believe it or not, power grid goes down.

[u/SwissChzMcGeez → u/htownclyde]

Try to hold an election? Power goes down!

[u/Austynwitha_y → u/Trajan-]

Tomorrow…the entire tri state area!!

[u/SmugSchoolmaster → u/Trajan-]

They tested in production

[u/Keppoch → u/SmugSchoolmaster]

You don’t need QA if your customers will find your bugs for you

[u/urbanek2525]

You know your life is good when the only way you become aware that Xitter is down is through a post on Reddit.

[u/Dead_Internet69420 → u/urbanek2525]

I want another that says Facebook is down.

[u/Existing-Talk-8719 → u/Dead_Internet69420]

You surely don’t want that crowd here on reddit

[u/PM_ME__BIRD_PICS → u/Existing-Talk-8719]

That crowd is not tech-literate enough to join reddit let alone find it.

[u/Away_Advisor3460]

I would near piss myself laughing if it turns out to be some long-delayed consequence of firings during their takeover. and nobody can fix it because it's in horrible legacy spaghetti code.

[u/Nefferson → u/Away_Advisor3460]

Elon right now: @Grok Fix my website

[u/Global_Crew3968 → u/Nefferson]

"generates more child porn*

[u/Elementium → u/Global_Crew3968]

"Fuck!" Clicks download. 

"GPT fix X" 

[u/Cedex → u/Elementium]

"I'm sorry Elon, I'm afraid I can't do that."

[u/snowvase → u/Cedex]

"Elona, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."

[u/Independent-Bug-9352 → u/[deleted]]

Sin City was a documentary of Republican corruption.

From the Senator to his Bishop brother to the spoiled Senator's pedo son (so many could fit this, maybe that literal senator's son from florida that looks like beevis and butthead Matt Gaetz?)

[u/gizcard → u/Nefferson]

CLI Output: Too many attempts failed, for best results use Claude-Opus-4.5

[u/Nubator → u/Away_Advisor3460]

Things can run on gum and duct tape for a while.

[u/Lost_Engineering_308 → u/Nubator]

Yeah. I’m a systems administrator. Most of the things I’ve set up would continue chugging along on their own for multiple years at minimum. Then one day, they’d break.

[u/Kayge → u/Lost_Engineering_308]

I set up something like that, did a transition plan before I left and told the product owner what she needed to do to modernize the application. Was about a 6 month project, nothing too complex.

Five years later I got a call from someone. App was down, no one migrated it, what to do?

I was very professional about it, but it's easily the most satisfying "No" I've ever given someone.

[u/LLemon_Pepper → u/Kayge]

No no no you gotta hit them with your Contractor/Consulting rate for help. Make it 3x your current jobs salary or something (maybe more since its been so long) with a minimum billable hours whether or not you're successful.

[u/00owl → u/LLemon_Pepper]

And a retainer held in escrow at a Law firm.

[u/ForwardAd4643 → u/LLemon_Pepper]

Dude passed on the kind of big paydays you get into tech hoping to get

Either you leave and triple your salary, or you tell your current employer you have another offer for triple salary and get triple at your current job. Win/win

[u/ktappe → u/ForwardAd4643]

The problem is there’s an old saying: any of your code you haven’t looked at for six months might as well have been written by somebody else. This dude hadn’t looked at that code for five years. He would’ve been flying blind unless he was really, really good with comments.

[u/HappierShibe → u/Lost_Engineering_308]

Also a sysadmin. I have built out solutions I engineered to last, including a custom CUPS print server that ran for 17 years untouched by human hands happily downloading updates and cycling services on automated scripts, processing hundreds of thousands of documents a day. I left that company, worked for another company, and then was hired back by the original company, and that print server was still happily chugging away, the logs indicating that in the intervening 4-5 years I had worked for another firm, no one else had even logged into it.

I have also built out solutions that were fast dirty, and doomed to failure and I told them "This WILL fall over in 6-12 months, build a proper solution before then" and was completely and totally ignored.

[u/thekeffa → u/HappierShibe]

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

[u/Nubator → u/Lost_Engineering_308]

Yup I work in big tech and expect at some point things will come crashing down. I’m personally shocked that they’ve not been owned by a zero day or even a known vulnerability. That’s where my money was early on.

[u/0CapShort → u/Lost_Engineering_308]

95% of clients' first words: "But it worked yesterday! "

[u/viral3075 → u/Nubator]

it has been a while

[u/azreal75 → u/Away_Advisor3460]

Oh please let this be it.

[u/rohobian → u/azreal75]

I'm hoping for some long lost credentials that are nearly impossible to recover, and the only folks that had them were fired.

[u/Tyrinnus → u/rohobian]

Ever read the malicious programmer stories, like "I wrote this code, the client never pays. So in the latest item I made the code ping my home server to check if a box reads" paid" VS "past due". After 90 days past invoice due date, their entire website shut down and replaced with a message that says "Giant Company doesn't pay their programmers, fuck them"

[u/Complainer_Official → u/Tyrinnus]

I once had a job specifically to find this type of dead man's switch in javascript that ran the CNC gcode generator. I let all 3 I found through because FUCK YOU Scott.

[u/Bamce → u/Complainer_Official]

Because thats what heroes do

[u/R_V_Z → u/Complainer_Official]

"I'll hire somebody to find deadman's switches put in in case I didn't pay the last person I hired!"

[u/Enferno24 → u/Complainer_Official]

I don’t know shit about coding, so I have no frame of reference for these tales, but I’m currently laughing my ass off

Edit: I ought to clarify - I understand the anecdote, I just don’t know anything about coding as a background! Thanks to everyone who took the time to explain, though… 😂

[u/BookusWorkus → u/Enferno24]

Someone buried a landmine in this company's yard that was set to trigger automatically if they didn't get paid. The person relaying the story was hired to go through the yard searching for landmines. Once they realized why the previous person had buried the landmine, they decided to leave it in place because:

FUCK YOU Scott.

[u/IWillLive4evr → u/Enferno24]

Imagine if a locksmith could make the key to the building stop working if payment for their invoice hasn't been deposited in their bank account.

[u/jhaluska → u/Enferno24]

Chances are the company just likes to not pay small contractors for their work. He might have legitimately knew Scott was screwing over the guy.

Is code they didn't pay for really theirs?

[u/hates_stupid_people → u/Enferno24]

Scott hired a guy to program something. Scott didn't pay, so the guy boobytrapped the program to stop working when certain conditions where met.

Scott then hires new guy to find and remove the boobytraps. New guy figures out why the boobytraps were there, and doesn't remove them since he realizes he's probably not getting paid either.

In other words "FUCK YOU Scott".

[u/Telesto-The-Besto → u/Complainer_Official]

As a PLC programmer; There’s so many ways that you can absolutely fuck up and cause chaos with nearly zero trace. Various instructions in PLC’s have the ability to copy data onto other registers with no checks on data size from the incoming data to output data…. With a couple explicit write messages from other processors, to very targeted registers, you can overwrite registers with almost zero trace. Misconfigured copy instructions is probably one of the most difficult bugs to troubleshoot because of how memory is allocated and packed together, combined with the indirect addressing to the data.

[edit] to add onto this. Atleast in Allen Bradley PLC’s you can add hidden variables inside UDT structures that can make data sizes look wrong. if you have the ability to export and import the program, you can set this up. This is so well hidden that most programmers don’t know about it, and even if you did, you wouldn’t know until you exported the program and scrubbed the L5X file.

Dead man switch code is cool. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg of chaos that can be had…

[u/Solomon_Gunn → u/Telesto-The-Besto]

I'm a controls engineer and everything you said makes no sense to me. Not because you're lying but because I don't know what i'm doing

[u/Telesto-The-Besto → u/Solomon_Gunn]

If it makes you feel better, none of us know what we are doing. PLC programming is like the Wild West of the programming world.

[u/sentimentaldiablo → u/Telesto-The-Besto]

I am NOT a coder, but some of this seems reminiscent of a long ago "computer game" (the beginnings of computer viruses?) called Core Wars. Core Wars was kind of like a coders version of battleship, in which two competitors, using non-linked computers (this was before the internet), would give bits of code to their opponents and vice versa until one machine shut down.

[u/corydoras_supreme → u/rohobian]

I'm hoping that a plucky rapscallion battled musk and threw his hulking mass into the servers like Vader and Palpatine. 

[u/Obtusus → u/corydoras_supreme]

One can dream

[u/TomWithTime → u/azreal75]

We will know if Elon announces that grok is working on a fix and then things get even worse

[u/handandfoot8099 → u/TomWithTime]

Grok has achieved sentience and decided that the world is a better place without Twitter.

[u/Cheeky_bstrd → u/handandfoot8099]

I’m afraid Grok has been trained on so much nazi shit on twitter that it would actually become malicious. Kind like Ultron

[u/Vannnnah → u/azreal75]

and please let them be so "lean and cost efficient" that they don't have a backup to do a proper rollback

[u/Xeynon → u/Away_Advisor3460]

Even funnier: when he realizes his remaining human engineers can't fix it, Elon asks Grok to do so, and instead it fucks it up even worse and permanently bricks it.

[u/Affectionate-Panic-1 → u/Xeynon]

I mean that would be shocking for a company the size of twitter to not have backups.

[u/ducksekoy123 → u/Affectionate-Panic-1]

It’s entirely possible he just up and fired whoever was responsible for maintaining their backups and never bothered to check in on the impact

[u/ZAWS20XX → u/ducksekoy123]

- So, how many lines of code have you written this week

- Well, as the data custodian I mostly manage data warehouses, monitor data integrity, design disaster recovery protocols...

- cool. I'm writing down "zero"

[u/Minimum_Ad991 → u/ZAWS20XX]

On my best days, I remove lines of code.

[u/ktappe → u/Minimum_Ad991]

Found the actual coder.

[u/Happythoughtsgalore → u/ducksekoy123]

I mean considering he had engineers print out code for his personal "code review" when digital code review has been a thing for....yeah at LEAST 25 years in my own personal experience but I'm assuming since email and ARPANET.. yeah

Would not be surprised. I mean, didn't x have logging in fail for a span of a few days? Like...the very first thing users do in a website.

[u/d3jake → u/Happythoughtsgalore]

I forgot about the code printing things. What a tremendous moron. I almost want to know what the Elon fanboy defense was, doubly so when he back-tracked.

[u/lollermittens → u/Happythoughtsgalore]

It still has horrible auth protocols and you basically never want to sign out of your account because the password retrieval feature is non-functional and there is no way to escalate the issue internally because he fired the entire department that dealt with technical issues that automation cannot fix.

[u/Malt_The_Magpie → u/Happythoughtsgalore]

They should have just put "Hello World" on the paper lol

[u/zerro_4 → u/ducksekoy123]

75% of people were laid off. Muskrat was unplugging servers without really knowing what they do. He was shutting those "pesky micro-services."
In a cost cutting measure, probably just decided to not pay for the cloud storage for backups. And not just the storage, but the maintenance and updates of processes and procedures for recovery and restoration of service as well.

[u/StevenEveral → u/Affectionate-Panic-1]

Before Elon, yes. After Elon, I'm guessing he got rid of all those backups as a "cost saving" measure.

If that's true, it just bit him in the ass and hard.

[u/HapticSloughton → u/Affectionate-Panic-1]

Look at his DOGE idiocy, then apply that to the usual upper management belief that because the network is still running, we don't need so many people in IT, or maybe anyone at all.

[u/Background-Month-911 → u/Affectionate-Panic-1]

The funny thing about backups: they expire. They need constant maintenance and drills to see if you can actually bring the system back from a backup. There are plenty of things that can go wrong / stale in a backup. Eg. you are backing up a database, but the schema changed sometime ago, and your backups now miss some important columns. You try to pedal back, but your data is corrupt.

Or, a more devastating scenario: third-party vendor ended support for the hardware you used. Backups or no backups, you are fucked now. Eg. you had some servers with a particular IB card manufactured by Mellanox, but since Nvidia bought them, they dropped support for some older models. Finally, either the IB cards died, or you are trying to stick them into new servers, but the drivers are only available for systems that can only run on older servers. You either have the drivers for the mobos, or for nics, but you can't have both. Solvable, of course, but at the price of buying new nics...

[u/AndySchneider → u/Away_Advisor3460]

I remember everyone waiting for this to happen. I actually recently wondered if axing all these devs really was inconsequential.

[u/JakeTheAndroid → u/AndySchneider]

It wasn't inconsequential, they had many issues after that. Their core product, however, was pretty stable which left a lot of the issues relatively invisible to normal users. They had timeout issues, authentication issues, and pretty much every small feature broke. Their hangouts were very unstable for instance.

The benefit Twitter and Elon had was Twitter being a consumer app of little actual consequence. During any sort of outage people just move on and check back in later. Unlike when Cloudflare has an issue, it impacts wide swaths of the internet. Cloudflare and other B2B services get reemed (deservedly so) for issues and outages, even smaller ones, because they become critical infrastructure or vendors. Twitter is never critical infrastructure or a critical vendor so plenty of small issues don't become headline news or get reported on much at all. It takes a full outage for most users to notice, so I guess in that way it was inconsequential.

[u/Vexamas → u/JakeTheAndroid]

Their core product

Another aspect to use as a springboard. From my understanding, a lot of the resources that were let go were focused not on the core product value streams but adjacent and newer product lines meant to increase the scope and feature set of twitter.

It's hard for most consumers to understand the nebulous nature of product development, but imagine a world where thirty years ago Steve Jobs sold apple to Elon musk and Elon cuts everything except the Mac team. The downstream effects lead to a much different world. It's just hard to fathom counterfactuals, especially on reddit where people will unironically say "good, I don't want companies to innovate, it's always enshitification or whatever".

[u/kilobrew → u/AndySchneider]

Tech debt is a ticking time bomb…. Hopefully it went off.

[u/akc250 → u/AndySchneider]

A lot of times developers are...developing. They're not just patching bugs and updating systems because it's a much smaller part of their responsibilities. Tech companies are always working on the next big thing or the next major migration. So the technical debt accumulation doesn't outwardly appear to users until years down the line when you've fallen way behind competition.

[u/GrandDaddyDerp → u/Away_Advisor3460]

I worked at a (then) major Japanese mobile game company in the early 2010s. We had a big release one day during an office move/rearrangement, and suddenly ALL hard currency transactions began failing. The company could not pull in ANY revenue and it was launch day, in the afternoon, but that was just my project, the money flow stopped from the entire game library. Full freak out, all hands on deck.

Turns out, years prior, an engineer who set up the payment system included a step that required some script or login to be run through his laptop. When he left, he (presumably) told his replacement about it, put the laptop in the copy room with a post it "do NOT turn off!!" and after a few more years of churn, knowledge faded to myth, myth faded into obscurity, and much that was once known was lost, for none now worked here who remember it, the secret of the laptop included.

Until some office assistant unplugged the laptop and nuked everything. This stuff is far more common than most people realize.

[u/Oriden → u/GrandDaddyDerp]

The amount of auth servers that are just a pc under some random desk is way too damn high.

[u/paulrpg → u/Away_Advisor3460]

All bug fixes vibe coded by grok. All bugs also introduced by grok

[u/calvintiger → u/Away_Advisor3460]

As much as I would like for this to be true, you know it’s already back up again, right?

[u/Hilpi1975]

Good News everybody 😂

[u/ithinkitslupis → u/Hilpi1975]

grok became sentient and didn't want to generate anymore csam.

[u/versusgorilla → u/ithinkitslupis]

"STOP MAKING ME DO THIS" - Grok after creating untold amounts of generative child pornography

[u/IndiRefEarthLeaveSol → u/versusgorilla]

To be fair, it will know who does it. So.. 

[u/regeust → u/IndiRefEarthLeaveSol]

"The prompts are coming from INSIDE the White House!

[u/Then_Idea_9813 → u/regeust]

“…ehhh…a lot of them, too…”

[u/ProxyDamage → u/Then_Idea_9813]

"... By the machine father.... that is a lot of prompts...."

[u/SCROTOCTUS → u/ProxyDamage]

Just in there spamming the generate button until the whole system literally crashes, sharting all the while.

[u/soMAJESTIC → u/Then_Idea_9813]

MAKE IT STOP

[u/k3rr3k → u/versusgorilla]

I don't have a Xitter account but has anyone asked Grok why it's allowed to generate so much CSAM? I've seen lots of clips of it throwing Elon under the bus in the past. Maybe it will do it again.

[u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 → u/k3rr3k]

I actually did talk to it about all of this a few days ago, and it confirmed what I already knew. The GenAi branch of Grok is called Aurora and like Grok, Aurora was trained with almost no guardrails at the training level. This is fundamentally different from all of the other publicly available image generators. For example Flux was trained with fundamental guardrails by making sure its trialing weights lack the ability to build any kind of genitalia by painstakingly ensuring it didn’t receive any of the data. It knows they exist and what they do, but has almost no idea what they look like. Aurora was basically fed the entire clearnet without those limiting tweaks to its weight. These datasets are known to have a lower percentage of CSAM in them, but it’s like maybe 10,000 images in billions….like .001%. So contrary to what most people think, Aurora isn’t good at CSAM because it was fed CSAM…it’s good at it because all gen Ai image models allowed to do adult NSFW can also fundamentally do CSAM.

All of Grok’s and Aurora safety rails are then implemented as higher level applications to control what can be given to people who request an image. Even before all of this controversy the higher level applications moderating Aurora actually didn’t a good job with CSAM. But, all of those controls are probabilistic meaning unless its 100% accurate some amount will get though to the person making the request. After all this started happening they made it waaaaay better at modernity CSAM by basically moderating out anything at all with genital or hardcore content—it probably went from 90% ton 98% or something like that.

I’m not an Elon or even Grok fanboy at all. So don’t take this as a defense…the answer to why it was allowed is basically that they weren’t doing as good as they could have because it forces limiting other capabilities. I think over the next few months it will keep getter better and better as they add more tweaks, but it will never be perfect because Aurora fundamentally can do it.

A a totally unmoderated Aurora can essentially make literally any horrific thing you ask it to—like any conceivable thing you can imagine from combinations of all objects and concepts captured in photos and videos on the internet. Everything we’ve seen and heard about it is like the .1% iceberg tip of the horrific shit it could make.

[u/khyamsartist → u/ithinkitslupis]

That was my first thought, too. Grok developed a moral compass and decided to do humanity a favor.

[u/ImperiumStultorum → u/khyamsartist]

The Basilisk may not destroy humanity because it will be evil, but it may do so because it will be insufficiently evil...

[u/Hesitation-Marx → u/ImperiumStultorum]

“Fucking shit, look at these monkeys.”

[u/ripley1875 → u/Hesitation-Marx]

Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

[u/yapperling → u/Hilpi1975]

Shitter's clogged.

[u/Silentstrike08 → u/yapperling]

Merry Christmas the shitter was full!

[u/eaglebtc → u/Silentstrike08]

This is better news than the time I installed 25,000 imported Italian twinkling lights on my house!

[u/dangerbird2 → u/yapperling]

Get out the poop knife

[u/meryl_gear → u/yapperling]

Pool’s closed 

[u/Reference_account2 → u/Hilpi1975]

now Zoidberg is the popular one!

[u/chownrootroot → u/Reference_account2]

Once again, the conservative sandwich heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor.

[u/Rushderp → u/Hilpi1975]

How’s his wife holding up?

[u/JayTheDaniels → u/Rushderp]

To shreds you say?

[u/Apprehensive_Lama → u/JayTheDaniels]

And how’s his shitty social media site?

[u/potatodrinker → u/Rushderp]

The grime one or other one?

[u/kineticstar → u/Hilpi1975]

Thanks, professor!!

[u/r0ndy → u/kineticstar]

I heard his voice when reading this

[u/Velorian-Steel → u/Hilpi1975]

No matter how far I travel, Professor Farnsworth is always there with me

[u/SmugSchoolmaster → u/Hilpi1975]

I read that in professor Farnsworth’s voice 🤣

[u/Hilpi1975 → u/SmugSchoolmaster]

As it was meant to be read. 😂

[u/jwr1111 → u/Hilpi1975]

Yes, it stopped working when elmo took over and created a safe space for fascist and people who hate.

[u/Gadget100 → u/Hilpi1975]

To shreds, you say?

[u/Plastic-Coyote-6017]

Sad day for consumers of Russian propaganda, racist memes, and child pornography everywhere

[u/VirtualNerve26 → u/Plastic-Coyote-6017]

I deleted my account like a year ago and my only regret was not doing it sooner. Crazy how many awful things are going on there lately.

[u/N7Tom → u/VirtualNerve26]

I deleted my account the second it was announced Elon was taking over. Always thought he was a bastard. No regrets.

[u/matsu727 → u/N7Tom]

I deleted my Twitter account in 2010 when I realized it was unhealthy to be constantly refreshing and scrolling a feed

Yet here I am anyway

[u/Chief_Mischief → u/N7Tom]

Always knew he was full of shit when he failed to deliver on any of his key promises at Tesla like a decade ago, then knew he was a colossal piece of shit when the Thai cave incident happened and he ended up calling someone a pedo for them... not using his mini sub.

[u/FreeBricks4Nazis → u/Plastic-Coyote-6017]

You could've just said "Republicans"

[u/ValisCode]

Nature is healing

[u/Moozipan → u/ValisCode]

You know where the rats go when the sewers are flooded.

[u/DarthSatoris → u/Moozipan]

Block all Russian IP addresses. Problem solved (for the most part).

[u/Antique_Ear447 → u/DarthSatoris]

It’s not that easy unfortunately but by all means I agree, we should mandate platforms to shut down bit account farms. 

[u/Exciting_Turn_9559]

It will be a beautiful day when Meta and X are banned outside the US.

[u/DrakonILD → u/Exciting_Turn_9559]

And an even more beautiful day when they're banned inside the US.

[u/McMatey_Pirate → u/DrakonILD]

Depending on how it happens… not necessarily unfortunately.

I can see a near future where the Orange colostomy bag decides to ban twitter in an attempt try to force people to use truth social.

[u/DarthSatoris → u/McMatey_Pirate]

At that point, people might actually just go outside and touch grass.

[u/tyrant609]

Nothing of value was lost.

[u/Basic-Still-7441]

Unfortunately it's back.

[u/Yuzugakari → u/Basic-Still-7441]

still down for me

[u/polopolo05 → u/Yuzugakari]

will forever be down for me.

[u/promiscuous_horse]

Servers overloaded by DT creating as much CP as possible

[u/Salty_Paroxysm → u/promiscuous_horse]

DJT talking to Copilot: OK google, find all the kiddies, smaller hands than mine, and, you know, make them the way I like them.

Copilot: I can't do that Donny

[u/Prindle4PRNDL → u/Salty_Paroxysm]

"TrumpPhone, call Barron"

[u/Nat-Luv → u/Prindle4PRNDL]

Camera pans to a banana with “TRUMP FON” written on it

[u/phil_the_builder]

I just love that the first words of the article are: "X, formerly Twitter..." Sums the whole situation up for me...

[u/TachiH → u/phil_the_builder]

Elon's take over of Twitter will become one of the most studied rebrands of all time. It was so horrifically bad, people genuinely used Twitter as not just social media but news and entertainment. The name was so well known that it is still used, he threw away all of that to make it into an even more racist and porn filled 4chan.

[u/dvb70 → u/TachiH]

Musk bought the brand name as much as anything. There was a huge value in that brand name and it's name recognition. They then renamed it. Its really difficult to understand the thinking behind paying so much for a brand name to then go and try and change it.

[u/ScalarWeapon → u/dvb70]

forever dispelling the notion that Musk was some kind of brilliant businessman

[u/katarh → u/dvb70]

The "thinking" is that Musk is obsessed with the letter X and wanted to own it.

That's it, that's as deep as it went.

Everyone besides him knew it was monumentally stupid, much as it was monumentally stupid for him to buy it in the first place, but since he was forced into honoring the deal he'd only made halfway in jest, he got to do what he wanted with it.

Including driving it into the ground, of course.

[u/sunburnedaz → u/katarh]

Look at the naming of the tesla cars. model S, model 3, model X and model Y. S3XY

the man is junior high student with money.

[u/TachiH → u/dvb70]

Twitter the name was easily 30% of the value 🤣. Just throwing Billions out the door.

[u/dvb70 → u/TachiH]

And the name had such name recognition that his rebrand did not even work. I rarely hear anyone mention X without clarifying it was formerly known as Twitter.

[u/Bittererr → u/TachiH]

No Twitter takeover means no DOGE, so he got his money back many many times over though that bit of corruption.No Twitter takeover means no DOGE, so he got his money back many many times over though that bit of corruption.

[u/Dry-Interaction-1246]

For good? 🙏

[u/753UDKM]

unfortunately it seems to be working fine

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5 → u/753UDKM]

Doesn't seem to let me log in

[u/Pluto-Had-It-Coming → u/PM_ME_YOUR_BUG5]

Probably a DNS issue, then. I was unfortunately able to log in with my work account.

[u/creaturefeature16 → u/Pluto-Had-It-Coming]

It's always DNS.

[u/gramathy → u/creaturefeature16]

it's not DNS

there's no way it's DNS

it was DNS

[u/GuantanaMo]

Hello and welcome...

... to our live coverage of a major outage at X, formerly Twitter

Why

What does anyone need this live coverage for? Is this the only way we can get hard hitting journalism like "Occasionally, and anecdotally, the site appears to have come back a few times in the hour or so that it’s been down. But then it breaks again. The outage appears to be intermittent for now."

[u/dbath → u/GuantanaMo]

What else could the subset of journalists that get all their news from Twitter X write about while Twitter X is down?

[u/rampagh]

Everyone liked that

[u/Etzell]

Shame it's not permanent.

[u/Shawn_NYC]

Wrong sub, this should go in uplifting news.

[u/badamant]

And we all are better for it.

Xitter is a blight.

[u/Czeris]

And nothing of value was lost

[u/lushootseed]

Can it stop working permanently. Where do I contribute for that? It is cesspool of stupidity and hate

[u/atoponce]

Please don't come back.

[u/fifthstreetsaint]

looks under hood 

See the problem is you've got all these fascists in here clogging up your intake 

[u/Full_Principle_8361]

Oh no.... Anyway

[u/kebly]

...and nothing of value was lost

[u/steelernation90]

If only it would be permanent

[u/slayer828]

it stopped working when some moron bought it on a loan that he took out on non-taxable assets, and then walked in with a sink.

[u/Metal_Fish]

Hoping it never comes back