Intermittent 404 responses from REST API

[remagio]

Too early to party, today the unmanaged 404 is back

[jamiel]

Really can’t find any reproducible way to report this issue. We are unable to uncover a pattern to recreate it. The same query works immediately afterwards, so I guess we just need to start building 404 retries into all our Twitter libraries if Twitter don’t feel this is an issue their end?

[Gazou_medialab2]

Although it looks like we are all having the same issue while we are all calling the API with our own ways or different libraries…
This really sounds to me like a problem to fix on twitter’s side…

[jamiel]

Hi all,

We have managed to put a temporary hack in to clear the errors this morning by forcing api.twitter.com to known working IPs. It seems one of the servers being returned in their DNS resolution might be having issues.

To resolve you can try adding this into your /etc/hosts on any boxes making API calls:

199.16.156.231 api.twitter.com

Some libs cache DNS results so you may need to restart your application for the change to take effect.

This is of course temporary and will stop working the day 199.16.156.231 is no longer a Twitter API server, so will need some alerting on this for production services and worth adding multiple IP’s (use “dig +short api.twitter.com A” to list possible options to test with) whilst Twitter resolve the issue.

Don’t forget to set yourself a reminder to remove it in the future!

Jamie

[remagio]

Since CET morning it works fine also without any DNS trick. We are monitoring and catching any 404 since the beginning but I hope Twitter keep us informed about when their intermittent 404 is solved.
We related our fixes to this Twitter issue,
Cheers
Renato

[Intrepidd]

We’re still seeing lots of errors

[remagio]

Probably is now in some way “zone dependent” within official Twitter balancers. Or only lucky.
Btw our servers located in NY1&NY2 plus EU1 didn’t get any 404 since this morning (CET tmz). Where usually we got since the beginning at any time.

[benorama]

Indeed, we don’t get any 404s since this morning, but we’ve got plenty of 500s instead (much more than 404s).

500:Something is broken. Please post to the group (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/support) so the Twitter team can investigate.
message - Internal error
code - 131

Here is the increase in number of exceptions by our error tracking system:

And nothing official on Twitter status page https://dev.twitter.com/overview/status.

Don’t you get thousands of 500s instead of 404s?

[Gazou_medialab2]

Here in France, still getting (a bit less) 404s, haven’t seen any 500.
Did not try and use a dedicated host, I’d rather know it’s happening than hide it and break another day.

[benorama]

So 404s are back since friday…
Nothing much has changed, still the same problem.
Anyone tried the DNS trick by @jamiel ?

[benjaminnimmo]

Same here plenty of 404’s. Not consistent to accounts or endpoints.

[edsu]

Interesting, so the problem seems to be geographically dispersed?

[mftb]

i’m seeing this often both on my personal machine and on my server-based robots. both when posting tweets and polling a mentions timeline. thankfully, the polling is only there as a backup to the streaming client, which works fine, but the errors when posting stuff are a problem when you can’t easily decide whether retrying is a good idea.

[QVSource]

We are also seeing intermittent 404 errors for the user_timeline endpoint.

[vaolaritei]

I have the same issue since August 7th and sometimes affects around 80% of the calls which makes unable to use the API from our application. It is someone working on this problem? How can we track a progress on this?

BR,
Valentin

[vaolaritei]

I tried the hack in the etc/hosts but was still getting 404 errors. Can be this a wrong error code returned by the API?

[FletchMarc]

We are seeing this issue as well. Any response from the twitter tech team?

[benorama]

It looks like the problem has been solved since Aug 14th. Cool !

[Intrepidd]

We’re seeing this as well.

Glad it’s finally sorted out but it’s a shame the twitter team didn’t acknowledge the issue.

[vaolaritei]

I still have this issue, but not so often as used to be. IMO i think that the bug is still there