Misc

TWiT’s $350,000 Website Has Been Down for Hours

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Update 2: Our long national nightmare is over. See below for Redis Labs’ response to Leo and his TWiT Army Troll DanLoFat.
Update 1: The reason the site is down is that Leo actually didn’t pay his bill for his website. See the additional chat log below. Leo is now trashing his provider’s customer service after he didn’t pay his bill.

What users see during the outage. No Leo salad here.
What users see during the outage. No Leo salad here.
TWiT’s $350,000 they gave to Four Toilets seems to have been well spent.

The turd of a website has been down since the early morning. Is Leo taking this seriously? Hell no.

<~Leo> working on it
<~Leo> I think redislabs went offline for us - probably didn't pay the bill
<Leo> that's a joke by the way
<Web4635> "Leo acknowledges unpaid bill cause of twit downtime."
*** Tater kicked Web4635 (Tater)

What will <@ScooterX> do without being able to refer people to twit.tv/cal? He may go clinically insane.

How will morons watch TWiT’s live stream if they don’t know the URL? Don’t worry. We got you covered there.

The web "team"
The web “team”
What team, Lisa? That tubby ogre that walks around with his hands on his hips before he pulls his curtain to hide himself in his closet of an “office” (Patrick)?

Further Leo Chat Log

<~Leo> no it wasn't hacked
<~Leo> redislabs closed our account for non-payment
<~Leo> we owe them $144
<~Leo> and I can't get in to fix it
<~Leo> waiting for them to call back
<~Leo> it's totally my fault
<~Leo> I didn't see the messages that the credit card had expired
<~Leo> so stupid of me
<~Leo> it's about as stupid
<~Leo> unfortunately they deleted my account!
<~Leo> so I can't get support or anything
<~Leo> it should have been on my credit card - but we'll fix that of course
<Redlynx> That happened to me with my work's Adobe CC account... they forgot to renew it.
<~Leo> ironic isn't it
<~Leo> the big stuff we handle
<~Leo> it's the little stuff that slips through the cracks
<~Leo> they have been sending me emails but they're buried within hundreds of other service emails from them
<~Leo> no excuse
<KBJockey> probably some script automatically deleted the account.
<RevDanOnimity> stoicsquirrel: jeez, happened to me last year, i pay my AWS with a paypal account (automatically, ironically), changed some payment methods, didn't pay attention, then couldn't figure out why half my website didnt work the way we planned.
<PutinOnTheRitz> I'd be looking for a diff co.
<~Leo> it's totatally on me
<~Leo> no my redislabs folder

Leo is too good for normal customer service channels, so he used what he described as “the nuclear option” on the MacBreak Weekly pre-show: he tweeted his dissatisfaction at the company. Apparently, companies should provide services in perpetuity for free — CacheFly/BitGravity/Ustream — for Uncle Leo.

Redis is on it.

Leo’s fans are bothering Redis Labs on his behalf as well, such as the infamous DanLoFat aka RevDanOnimity aka Danonymous (old guy who complains constantly and is then muted by <@ScooterX> in #twitlive).

The Resolution

82 thoughts on “TWiT’s $350,000 Website Has Been Down for Hours”

  3. When you spend $350,000 on a custom-built, custom-coded website, you’d expect as a bare minimum for the application to throw friendly error messages so users can be directed to Facebook, Twitter etc.

    It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. And yet this flagship site doesn’t do it.

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  5. I’ve seen Lisa Laporte being snide to people so often, instead of reading her reply as a confirmation that they’re on top of things, I read it as a dismissive “well DUH, *obviously* we know our own website is down, you idiot”.

    That’s the reputation she’s built for herself, and no amount of blog posts about how she always tries to find the good in people can undo the experience we’ve all had of seeing what she’s like, live on Twit.

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  6. “Honey, we’re going to have to cancel our winter trip to the Swiss Alps. The website is down and it’s going to cost us big time to get it back up.”

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    1. Backup servers located in different facilities? Load balancing? Test upgrades before rolling them out? Only amateur operations don’t do all this stuff.

      Did some of the 350K go to Uncle Carmine?

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    1. It’s unlikely they turned off his service one day after the due date. He must be quite past due – and someone has been ignoring what must have been several warning emails?

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      2. The Prick House said:
        It’s unlikely they turned off his service one day after the due date. He must be quite past due – and someone has been ignoring what must have been several warning emails?

        September. So leo and Lisa ignored many “Your credit card on file has expired” messages. I pay for many services with a credit card. It’s expiring next month. I have received many messages about this important upcoming event. ‘Nuff said.

        Let’s see:
        1. Leo ignored many messages about expiring crdit card.
        2. CEO/bookeeper seems to have no way of tracking recurring expenses and reconciling against invoices/credit card statements.
        3. A guess but it appears TWiT has no website service monitoring system. They rely on the ‘fans’ to alert them.
        4. Fill in your own here.

        All in all a business that only exists to feed Leo’s endless desire for toys and Lisa’s craven greed.

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        1. Total amateur hour here. My CC expired in December, I knew it was going to expire that month the day I got it, several years ago, its says so right on the card itself when it was going to. As soon as the new card arrived, 3 weeks before it expired, I went through every account I use it on, to update the billing. No problem. It was maybe 12 accounts, and took me part of a Sunday afternoon with half a pot of coffee to go to all the various websites and update the billing info.

          But, how can a “team” manage this, if the card is in Leo’s wallet?

          Their bookkeeping must be a nightmare of forgotten invoices and personal/business accounts mingled together. I can’t fathom why, after all these years, Leo is using personal credit cards to pay for services for the corporation, that notices for anything goes to his personal email, and the CEO is allowing it. A service like that should be paid for by a corporate card, under the control of the CEO or her accountant/bookkeeper/office manager, they should be tracking expiration dates, and notices from vendors. They have a staff. A STAFF. This kind of thing should be tracked and managed by this staff. That’s what they’re there for!

          They’re surrounded by the latest and greatest tech. They do shows on software for small business. She is offering her services to others for this exact kind of thing. This should never have happened. I get it, shit happens, mistakes happen, but this never should have – and they’re lucky it’s something minor. This is a complete repudiation of the CEO’s ability to run a small company. This is embarrassing.

          What’s next, they lose the new office space because she’s paying rent via Paypal, and it screwed up?

          Remember, she’s using the word “artisan” in her company name. This is not “artisan” level management. If you’re not raising holy hell in Petaluma today having every vendor account reviewed for payment method, and getting everything onto corporate cards and checking accounts, being tracked and managed by your “team”, you’re a fraud.

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          2. An “artisan ” is a skilled manual worker, and who among us can deny that the ceHO has applied her construction site, hard hat, bookkeeper skillset upon #WiTuWiLeo ? #LipPlumper

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  12. So he was so busy over ordering a Tesla he neglected to pay a $140 bill that took his entire site down.

    First, how unprofessional of him. Second, there’s nobody else to pay the bills? What do all the back office staff do?

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  13. LOL’d SO F’n HARD STILL DOWN!!!! I’m glad I dropped in the chat here earlier and tipped off about it. Total Drama has had a serious impact on Leo’s ability to get the bills paid apparently.

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  14. WOW… Just WOW…

    If your entire business model depends on your website, wouldn’t you make sure that you prioritise those bills over an expensive bottle of wine.

    FFS TWiT… I’m losing all faith in you.

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      1. No kidding. Professional bookkeeper here. My company typically only uses credit cards (and company cards at that, not personal ones) as a more traceable replacement for petty cash, and even then only for trusted individuals. What we lose in interest and fees is a lot less than what we used to lose in poor petty cash tracking.

        On rare occasions, we’ll use them for companies with whom we don’t have accounts and require immediate payment up-front, such as locksmiths or taxis. Also, sometimes we’ll order some oddball piece of low-cost equipment from an ebay seller, and pay by credit card. But that’s it. Paying for a company’s recurring and predictable expenses (such as website hosting) by a credit card, even a company card, is highly unprofessional.

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  16. Also TotalDrama called it Twit has shutdown in 2016. Will the last person out of the Brickhouse turn off the lights… Never mind the power has been shutoff already!

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  18. TWiT may have gotten boring but this is a funny post.

    The remaining fans are really sad. “oh don’t worry Leo, it’s not your fault” “Oh Leo, it has happened to me too” “I totally understand Leo”

    Fuck that.
    Bills should go to a separate email, maybe a business email?
    Isn’t the CEO responsible to enter bills and payments? Why does she get all the credit for organizing the business and none of the blame. Is she a CEO or a girlfriend, pick?

    I would like an important update on her CEO blog. I WANT THE ANSWERS, I WANT THE TRUTH

    HAHAHAHAHA
    HAHA

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  21. So, the head TWIT forgot to pay his bill and he is supposed to get special treatment from the Web hosting company? Who does he think he is? They should terminate his contract and tell him to go elsewhere. We don’t need you as a customer.

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  23. This is astonishing.

    Ok, so he’s incompetent enough that he gets a critical business bill sent to his personal email.

    But on top of that, he doesn’t even bother to use the most basic of filtering and labelling to make sure any bills get flagged up, forwarded on etc.

    Honestly, that’s more astonishing than many of the other dumb decisions he’s made.

    Most everyday people probably don’t know much about mail filtering, but someone of Leo’s experience should be intimately familiar with the labelling system of services like Gmail (assuming that’s what he uses) – it’s powerful and easy and *works*.

    A business owner’ critical website gets cut off cos he didn’t read a critical email. That is just unbelievable.

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  24. By the way – the thing he failed to pay, and which took his whole online presence down, wasn’t even his core web server.

    It’s an example of the needless complication of what should be a simple website.

    I won’t go into much detail here (if anyone wants to know about the unusual way his new website works, I can go into detail), but instead of having stuff that happens on a web server, he has several layers of other stuff.

    The bill that he failed to pay was for live web page caching. Stuff generated by his fancy web application gets taken off and stored elsewhere.

    It makes web pages marginally faster. That’s all. For a site like Leo’s it is absolutely completely unnecessary. The old site was fast enough – the key thing is, is a site fast enough to stop you clicking away to another page. But people don’t casually browse to Twit – it is a destination that people have already chosen to go to. People will put up with a MUCH slower website if they’re already committed to visiting the page. The old Twit site was plenty fast enough.

    Leo’s new website is actually done in a really cool way. But it’s only done like that cos Leo wanted a new toy. There is absolutely nothing to gain for his website to be done in such a complicated way. For a big media streaming organisation, sure, it would make sense. But a website for a network that has almost all its content consumed as audio downloads? A total waste of time and money.

    And, as we’ve seen today, it’s just several more layers of things to go wrong.

    I mean, what sort of tech team sets up a caching system but then doesn’t have any kind of system in place in case the caching service is offline? Caching is not critical, the website itself is.

    Dumb, dumb people.

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    1. Micro service architecture poorly designed without any sort of error controls. Amateurish. And you correctly point out it is totally unnecessary. How dumb is this operation?

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    1. As the heads of a major broadcast network, $140 is such a paltry sum its not worth considering for L&L. They have important things like $20K cruises and $100K Teslas to focus on.

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  27. If you Don’t care about your hosts. Don’t cAre about your audience. Don’t care about your bills. Don’t care about your website. What comes next?

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      1. Which renders him voiceless and paralyzed from the neck down.

        So, how long do you think the ceHO tends to the truly Soup Slurper before she places him in a congregate care facility, and embarks on her next luxe cruise with her son?

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  28. I thought the whole point of the new website was to build an app engine back end, where the API could be made available to that twit apps could be developed for any platform very easily. Havent you seen all the apps that use it? oh wait….

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    1. pewtie said: I thought the whole point of the new website was to build an app engine back end, where the API could be made available to that twit apps could be developed for any platform very easily. Havent you seen all the apps that use it? oh wait….

      I was thinking of registering as a developer to get an API key, in the hope that there might be some kind of clue how many other people had registered. Probably not, but given that these people built a website that serves its data off a cache, and then didn’t bother adding one line of code like “if cache is offline, serve a basic version of website” (or, to actually justify spending $350,000, add code that can run a live website OR a cached website, like a pro would do), it wouldn’t surprise me if the API key is in the format A000000009.

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  32. WTF was going on on iOS Today this week?!? Leo seems to be way off his meds or something. He was speeding like a Meth addict base jumping without a parachute. Walking all over Megan, going off-tangent and someone please keep Leo away from any music or art creation apps. The man may have the golden voice but he doesn’t have any artistic neurons for drawing or creating music.

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    1. Mr. Laporte’s history of continually interrupting anybody, any time, for any reason is long and epic. He an archetypal, consummate, and vainglorious narcissist.

      Just sayin’ and best regards

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  33. It’s astonishing there still remain a dwindling few douche-bags that download TWiT shows. You’d figure by now even these stupid d-bags would have enough common sense to move on and far away from this piece of shit enterprise. FUCK YOU LEO…How do you like that?

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  34. If only he actually used SquareSpace instead of just using it as a Podtrack ad, his website wouldn’t have went down, and he could have bought two Teslas one for him and one for Bulldog face. Come on Leo, prioreties man. Two Teslas are much more important than a $350,000 website. How in the world can you show off to every nobody blogger that comes on your shows if you don’t have a Tesla?

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  35. I just don’t understand how they are still selling enough advertisements to sustain twit. Look at their views on YouTube, they are abysmal for the type of operation they claim to have. It’s also funny to note that a lot of the videos having 50% disliked rating or worse for the TNT videos.

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  37. In this case i can relate to leo i forgot to update the card for my nest stuff and they never emailed me nothing except ads,I found out when i tried to look at a timeframe on my dropcam

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  38. Can’t believe the cheek of DanLoFat to stick his fucking nose in and start blaming the company lol. Cheeky bastard giving the company a hard time because TWiT can’t fucking manage to pay their bills on time or manage basic business administration.

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    1. > there is no need to be vulgar about it.

      You must be new here. It used to be 1000X worse. It’s readable now, the comments are almost all civil, and the blog’s subjects are on-topic about TWiT, Leo, or his “CEO” rather than the imagined vaginal odor of a TWiT’ woman guest. << Yep, that used to be a common theme.

      Using fake names through proxies, they no longer make bogus accusations about real people with real jobs and real families that could have landed the posters in court if their off-shore servers or anonymizing vpns gave-up their real IPs.

      My fez is off to the new TD. Hope it lasts.

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    2. PodCulture said:
      Man…folks sure get riled up about nothing.Don’t like TWIT shows?Don’t listen…easy peasy.Really feel like you have to be a critic?OK fine…critique away, but there is no need to be vulgar about it.

      When I saw his tweets it was the words that came to mind and I expressed them. Who does he think he is being condescending and rude to a company who are happy to provide a good service when they are paid to do so. TWiT make a habit out of forgetting to pay people for services rendered.

      I don’t listen or watch TWiT shows now and knew nothing of the site being down until I read it on here earlier. The only entertainment TWiT provides for me these days is reading this blog.

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