This began with a random walk through photo sharing site Flickr. My Twitter obsession promptly asserted itself when I caught a glimpse of an error message from the early days by Hil. Hil pointed out this puzzling typo.
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| Twitter capacity overload or something else? |
As the Twitter platform has evolved, so has the imagery associated with its service outages. The Fail Whale is an immediately recognizable indicator to users. It conveys that activity levels cannot be accommodated... temporarily. This can be due to many things.
- raffles or contests using Twitter for entries or updates
- hacking exploits, to which Twitter is vulnerable. There seems to be less of that now; perhaps the novelty has worn off a bit?
- challenging site reliability issues for the @twitengineering team
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| Fail Whale swap |
There are many depictions of the eponymous Fail Whale. I'll hazard a guess that the Fail Whale represents the backlog of unsent tweets, a large clog in the Twitter flow.
Resolution is in sight, as the Fail Whale is located and borne aloft by an enabling flock of helpful Twitter birds, bringing us back online again!
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| Over capacity depiction by Shovelling Son |
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