I think it's only newsworthy in this space - where, as some of us are the ones responsible for these systems - we are trying to learn why this happened in order to prevent it.
I agree that learning from why Twitter was down will be interesting and when that story comes out I hope it will be high on Hacker News. But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.
> But this sort of news story about something that's happening right now is symptomatic of the useless '24 hour news' cycle of noise.
The single most important part of the internet is the immediate availability of news (to me, anyway). I've never heard anyone complain about that before; why do you think it's not worth knowing and talking about events as they happen? 'Twitter is down' isn't noise. Years and years ago there were stories about fire departments (SF I think?) that started using Twitter to send out fire notices. Here in Montreal, the police tweet very quickly and accurately about our daily student protests.
Twitter is extremely important to a huge number of people, and when it goes down, a site like HN definitely should be talking about it. It's big news and it's almost exclusively relevant while it's happening.
So, here in the UK Twitter is back for me. It looks like I was without it for about 45 minutes. Call it an hour for a nice round figure.
Think about these two scenarios:
1. During that one hour you spend your time focussed on talking about this event as it's happening, speculating, having an emotional response (because you can't access something you want to and find a group of people experiencing the same thing and all get together to experience the frustration).
2. Tomorrow you read a story that says "Twitter was down for one hour yesterday" with some detail about what happened.
I believe that the latter is preferable. It's more efficient, less emotional and more useful. The former is the same as watching some 'Breaking News' event while is happening.
Now imagine that the one hour of downtime happened when you were asleep. You've missed nothing.
There are two scenarios where this news is important: if your business depends on Twitter, and if you are trying to assess the reliability of Twitter. The latter can be achieved by #2 above, only the former needs real-time updates and that doesn't mean general news reporting just your own monitoring.
It seems like your perspective is that HN exists for the links it points to. I read HN for the discussion, and this thread has many good discussions in it.
You know, learn from others mistakes and all.