Intermittent failures for request and access tokens

[soung3]

Correct, we’re seeing 500’s for oauth/access_token requests. We haven’t dug into what type of accounts are encountering this error (e.g. new users, existing users, etc).

[richardhyland]

I’ve had a number of reports of 500 errors for this too oauth/access_token

Many seem to be first time users, I’ve personally not experienced it through testing of removing and re-signing into my account

[Kbajaj91]

Hi @andypiper for hootsuite app we are seeing 401 when trying to fetch user info. If needed i can provide with exact requests, timestamp and auth tokens that resulted in a 401 in a private thread.

[DaveSumter]

Hi @andypiper, I took some traces today in order to give you guys some more detailed info. Here goes:

• First timers only: We’re only getting 500’s for new user authentications. Users that have authenticated the app before do not experience this failure when re-authenticating (we only saw 1 re-authentication failure in our sample).
• 50% affected: Roughly 50% of first timers will receive 500’s. 50% authenticate first time successfully (our exact split was 53/47).
• 1-3 mins of retries: Users usually have to retry for a few minutes before they can successfully authenticate for the first time. They may receive multiple 500’s before they can get in (eg. 2 to 10 retries).
• All countries: Users from all countries are affected.
• All account ages: All twitter account ages affected (1 day old accounts to multiple years).
• All tweet/follower/friends sizes: Mature and new twitter accounts affected equally.

Hope this helps. Sample size was 100 new users, so statistically rough numbers only.

Thanks
Dave

[thecounter]

Hello,

I’m a developer from Twitter Counter and we’re having a related problem. 10 days ago we started receiving code: 401 in our requests, causing a huge (thousands of it) lost of user tokens.

Currently most of our requests right now are receiving: {"code":89,"message":"Invalid or expired token."}, so we’re not able to do anything in background (we are a analytics platform) and this is giving us big headaches right now.

Do you guys know how can we proceed with it? We need to find a solution for this as soon as possible.

CC: @andypiper

Thanks,
Guilherme

[andypiper]

As you can see from this thread, we are aware of (and looking into) an intermittent issue. Can you let us know whether your issue is identical (i.e. related to oauth/access_token requests), or something different? It’s important to avoid conflating two different problems. If you have a separate problem please give us as much information as possible about the circumstances and specific symptoms.

[thecounter]

Hello @andypiper,

Thank you for your quick answer.

Might not be related at all, but we’re still receiving the same response code as the thread is talking about.

Let me explain a little bit more, we have a process that’s running every minute and when we are trying to validate users (already registered) credentials by using GET account/verify_credentials we are receiving the Invalid or expired token error. All users we lost the tokens were receiving a 401 response at August 18.

[andypiper]

This does not sound directly linked If you cannot match the endpoint call and symptom. Please open a new thread. I cannot comment on individual apps or keys for privacy reasons, but the team will endeavour to investigate.

[thecounter]

@andypiper okay Andy, thank you! I’ll open it.

[Socialfave]

Hello Andy,
Philippe from Socialfave (CEO) - @TheMisterFavor on Twitter, and @Socialfave for the companie.
We start launching Socialfave V2, a great Twitter tool to manage content, followers…, to shedule, to analyze, And we market on Facebook at this time to have many friends signing up.
So many people want to sign up and have this issue when trying to authorize their Twitter for Socialfave (authentification).
We had not this problem before, and it’s truly at the bad moment.
Have you an idea when it solved?
I will also invite you on FB, with Philippe TREBAUL Bis, because I won’t come all the time to check the answers (maybe yes…because so anxious with that…So huge challenga for us).
so, I thank you for your answer, and I truly hope it will be solved very very soon.
Have a very nice day, Andy.
God bless you!
Philippe

[Socialfave]

We have exactly the same code, Dave.
And we have quite the same ratios.
Philippe

[Socialfave]

Hello Dear Andy,
Can you answer please?
We receive all the time error 500.
We’re launching Socialfave and it’s truly a very bad situation for us.
We’ve been working very hard for 2 years on this tool and now, when we start to market it, we have non stop feed back with this error message.
Please, tell me when you can fix it.
Thank you.
Philippe

[DaveSumter]

Thanks Philippe, it seems to be affecting multiple apps since the 6th of August. The only known workaround at the moment is to retry the request - it will sometimes succeed with repeated attempts…

I suggest you check back here every couple of days for responses. It’s probably impractical for responses to be posted on other platforms such as FB…

[Socialfave]

Hello Dave,
Thank you for your answer.
Yes, I understand.
It’s truly very ennoying for us because we are just stating to launch Socialfave;
We have been working 2 years on it, on development and pre marketing.
I understand for FB…I’m not used to these kinds of discussion…That’s why. i’m not the IT. My IT would have certainly not acted the same way…
Neverthelesss, I’m very kind and respectful (but stressed because 90% of the persons wanting to sign up have this error 500…And it’s a few discouraging.
Have a very nice weekend.
God bless you!
Philippe

[Socialfave]

Hello Andy,
Some additional.
For us, it’s still about 25% of new users succeeding to sign up (error 500 when authentifying with Twitter), only.
Thank you for your answer.
Philippe

[andypiper]

Hi everyone, this is an ongoing investigation on our side. Thanks for your patience.

[Socialfave]

Thank you Andy.

[soung3]

@andypiper Are there any updates on this failure? Since 9/30/2016, we’re starting to see an uptick in errors when obtaining an access token. To provide more detail, we’re seeing a mix of HTML error page responses and “This feature is temporarily unavailable” response bodies. It also appears that successful requests for an access token succeed on the first try and retries don’t provide any higher likelihood of obtaining an access token.

[bradleybernard]

Getting this a lot and for some reason I cannot reproduce the error.

'data' => 'This feature is temporarily unavailable',
'code' => 401,
'url' => 'https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token',

Any update on this?

[AlexanderJAllen]

I’m also seeing this error and unable to reproduce it.