Yes, Twitter has been up down and all around today. Moving sloooow for many and completely offline (for a little bit) for others.

If you’d read our other post, you knew (immediately) when Twitter was down today. If you didn’t, you may have panicked and thought the Syrian Electronic Army scored big.

But not today, SAE! Not . . . yet.

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Yep, Twitter has been going up and down like a merry-go-round today. Has this annoyed you? Affected business interactions possibly? Or maybe the only real trouble you’ve had is wasting time reading posts reporting these supposedly catastrophic outages (they’re really not a huge deal).

So we will now save you from having to read said posts ever again, by showing you how you can know immediately the next time Twitter is down.

And when those “OH MY GOD, TWITTER IS DOWN!!!” posts pop up, you can just ignore them. Unless Twitter is down ALL day. But we’ll show you where to go then too.

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I don’t condone violence against animals, but I have to admit, this game is pretty fun. You get to take all of your rage at Twitter’s downtime out on the innocent (but easy to scapegoat) fail whale. Shoot as many whales as you can in 25 seconds, and then tweet your results.
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If you had some kind of twisted love for seeing the Fail Whale, you’ll probably be disappointed with this news: Twitter has completed its migration into a custom-built data center that should be able to meet the needs of its explosive growth and demands on its servers.
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You don’t see it quite as often nowdays, but Twitter’s Fail Whale, its personalised 404 error page, used to be quite a regular on the network.

But how did such a creature come to be?

Over on Quora, the creator of the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu (@YiyingLu) has revealed how the inspiration for her design was based on an original piece entitled Lifting A Dreamer, which Lu used for an e-greeting card for a friend.

And it featured an elephant.

In 2006, Lu, studying overseas, changed the lead animal to a whale, since she was currently residing in New South ‘Wales’.

When Lu placed the image on iStockphoto, Twitter stumbled upon it and snapped it up, replacing their current 404 page, which believe it or not was an LOLcat.

The finally piece of the puzzle came together in May, 2008, when Twitter user Nick Quaranto (@qrush), perhaps frustrated at that dark time in Twitter’s history when it felt like the site was down as often as it was up, tapped into the zeitgeist and proposed a name that stuck.

And with this, a legend was born. Yet, with its increasingly fleeting appearances, some now say that it never existed. That it was simply an urban legand. A myth. And that we made it all up.

But those of us old enough to remember know the truth. And we hope and we pray that, much as we admire the artwork, the Fail Whale is, for the most part, gone for good. Rest ye well, old fella, rest ye well.

On Wednesday night, New Yorker Twitter-ers got to meet a Twitter superstar: Yiying Lu, the creator of the infamous Twitter “Fail Whale”. She was at the #ShortyArtShow showing some of her cute, spunky art and the campaign image she made for Conan O’Brien’s efforts to get a Shorty Award. Check out some exclusive photos of the night below.
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Think you know everything there is to know about Twitter? We bet there are some things that even the most elite Twitter users are in the dark about. Here are 17 facts about Twitter that would probably surprise Biz and Ev themselves!
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This is pretty cool, and nicely illustrates the power of CSS3.

(The above is a simple screen capture. Click on the image to see the CSS in action. May not work properly if your browser is archaic doesn’t support Webkit.)

Not the most useful of error messages, is it?

Three things I’m curious about:

1. Do the Twitter engineers automatically get sent a report each and every time this page appears?
2. Does it go into detail as to why it happened, or just say it happened?
3. If not (and even so), why is there no ‘report this error’ button?

Most of the time, this error can be ‘fixed’ with a simple refresh. But not always, and you’d be amazed how often default pages like this are used as a catch-all for a myriad of serious faults on major websites.

The dreaded fail whale is increasingly a thing of the past, but I see one of these error pages at least once a day. I really hope somebody important is paying attention and this isn’t all just lip service.

Twitter’s fail whale has been making quite a few appearances of late and the Twitter stream has been making its feelings on this quite clear: people hate it. For the majority, an appearance by the fail whale feels like a real slap in the face.

Illustration originally by @yiyinglu

To be fair, Twitter is doing a lot of maintenance and upgrades of late and with news that membership in the USA alone has now reached 14 million users, this is increasingly essential.

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