TweetHunt

For a few years in the late 2000s, one of the most recognizable images on the internet was an error page. When Twitter was overloaded, which happened often, visitors saw a drawing of a whale being carried through the sky by a flock of small birds, with a message that the service was over capacity. Users named it the Fail Whale, and it became a mascot for a whole era of the platform.

This is a short history of that image and the culture around it. We describe the artwork in words rather than reproduce it, because it belongs to its creator.

A site that kept falling over

Twitter launched in 2006 and grew quickly, especially after the 2007 South by Southwest festival, where it caught on with the tech crowd. Its infrastructure couldn't keep up. According to figures from the monitoring service Pingdom, cited by Time, the site was down for close to six days in total during 2007.

Big news moments were the worst. The death of Michael Jackson in June 2009 sent a wave of traffic that overwhelmed the service, and the 2010 World Cup caused repeated short outages as people posted about goals, cards and penalties at the same moment. CNN reported in June 2010 that Twitter had suffered nearly five hours of complete downtime that month alone. Every one of those outages meant a lot of people looking at the same page.

Where the whale came from

The image wasn't drawn for Twitter. Designer Yiying Lu made it as a digital illustration called Lifting a Dreamer, originally to send birthday wishes to friends who lived far away, and posted it on the stock image site iStock. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone found it there and thought it would make a friendly error message. Twitter began using it around May 2008.

The picture itself is gentle: a calm whale, lifted out of the water by eight little orange birds holding it up with strings. It turned a frustrating moment into something close to charming. You couldn't post, but at least the birds were trying.

The name "Fail Whale" came from users. Lu later won the design category at the first Shorty Awards, which honored work on social media, in 2009.

A mascot people chose

Error pages are usually something people try to forget. This one got a fan club. People drew their own versions, made T-shirts and fan art, and set up fan pages. The whale showed up in conference talks about scaling web services and in jokes about the latest outage.

Part of the appeal was timing. Twitter was still small enough that many users felt they were in on something, and outages became shared events. Seeing the whale and then posting about it once the site came back was part of the experience. Creative contests built around it were a natural next step: in 2008, this very domain hosted a fan-run contest to design a beer label inspired by the whale, one of many community projects that took the error page as a theme.

How early Twitter invented itself

The Fail Whale belongs to a period when users shaped much of how Twitter worked. Several features people now take for granted started as user habits:

  • The @reply. People began putting an @ in front of a username to address someone, and Twitter later built replies and mentions around it.
  • The hashtag. In August 2007, Chris Messina proposed using the # symbol to group posts about a topic. Twitter didn't support it at first; users kept using it anyway, and hashtags became clickable later.
  • The retweet. Users copied other people's posts with "RT @name" in front, long before Twitter added an official retweet button in late 2009.
  • Even the word "tweet" caught on among users before it became Twitter's official term.

The Fail Whale fit right in. It was Twitter's image, but users gave it a name and a personality.

Slaying the whale

Behind the scenes, Twitter's engineers spent years fixing the problems that brought the whale out. Time described how the company moved key back-end systems off the Ruby on Rails framework it had started with and onto software running on the Java Virtual Machine, and split its code into separate services, such as tweet storage and messaging, that teams could work on independently. Twitter engineer Rafi Krikorian called the old firefighting sessions "whale hunting expeditions."

Uptime improved steadily from the summer of 2010. By 2013, according to Pingdom data cited by Time, Twitter had no downtime at all in seven of the year's first eleven months. In November 2013 Christopher Fry, then Twitter's head of engineering, told Wired that the Fail Whale had been taken out of production earlier that year. Error pages after that showed robots instead.

Lu has continued to work as a designer and artist, and the whale still turns up in nostalgic posts whenever a big platform has a bad day.

What contest organizers can take from it

The Fail Whale shows how much people enjoy taking part in something playful together, even when the starting point is a broken website. A good contest or scavenger hunt on X runs on the same energy: a shared theme, room for everyone's own take, and an organizer who keeps things friendly and fair.

If you're planning one, our scavenger hunt ideas and the kit builder are a good place to start. If your contest involves original artwork, read how to judge a design contest fairly, and remember that artwork belongs to the people who make it, as the Fail Whale's own story shows.

Sources

Questions

Who drew the Fail Whale?

The illustration was made by designer Yiying Lu, who originally called it 'Lifting a Dreamer'. Twitter used it on its over-capacity page from 2008.

When did Twitter stop using the Fail Whale?

Twitter's engineering chief told Wired in late 2013 that the image had been taken out of production earlier that year, by which time outages had become rare.

Why was it called the Fail Whale?

The name came from users, not from Twitter. People who kept seeing the image during outages started calling it the Fail Whale, and the name stuck.

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