The "Fail Whale" (2nd article/3rd MP)

On Wednesday morning, January 20th, Twitter crashed. It was only down for about an hour and a half. While the site was down, users saw an extremely high volume of "whales." When Twitter crashes, the site owners have it set up to post a picture of what is appropriately names The "Fail Whale". It is simply a picture of a whale lifted slightly above the ocean with birds pullling it up via thin strings. The Fail Whale pops up whenever users try to access the site when it crashes. It has become an iconic symbol for Twitter and is a way for the site to embrace its crashing and shortcomings and turn them into a funny symbol. During the recent outage no data was lost. It was the first major outage since August when other social networking sites were also attacked and crashed. Twitter has been growing rapidly with it's number of users so the reliability needs to stay strong. "Reliability has been an ongoing project for Twitter as the service has scaled up to handle growing traffic," Rich Miller wrote. Benn Parr also said that recnet news about Haiti and the frantic status updates on that topic may have contributed to the site's crash. So next time you visit Twitter and see a "Fail Whale", you'll know that the site has crashed.