For those new on Twitter The Fail Whale is a signal that Twitter is down. Just like in any other sites that suddenly gets a big number of users, maintenance or errors and delays are quiet natural.
When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message image created by Yiying Lu, an illustration of red birds using nets to hoist a whale from the ocean along with the text “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.”
Twitter experienced approximately 98 percent uptime in 2007, or about six full days of downtime. Twitter’s downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address. During May 2008 Twitter’s new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
Found this video of a spoof when Adolf Hitler found out that Twitter was down. It was quiet emotional moment for him. Really hilarious video. Would you react like he did? What do you do when you see a Fail Whale?
Here are some funny things that people did the last time Twitter was down according to an article on TechCrunch:
- Talk about Twitter being down on FriendFeed
- Talk about Twitter being down on Facebook
- Talk about Twitter being down over IM
- Leave a comment on a blog post about Twitter being down (preferably this one)
- Talk about Twitter being down via text message
- Talk about Twitter being down over email
- Tip TechCrunch that Twitter is down
- Write your own blog post about Twitter being down (for an example, see this blog post)
- Talk about Twitter being down on
PowncePlurk - Talk about Twitter being down on Identi.ca
- Talk about Twitter being down internally on Yammer
- Think about Twitter being down
- Call an actual friend to talk about Twitter being down
- Invite an actual friend over to talk about Twitter being down
- Go outside
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