Twitter Fail Whale Error Message By Yiying Lu

The Story of the Fail Whale
How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community
Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.