The FailWhale, an illustrated graphic of a whale supported by birds, gained fame during Twitter’s downtime. Created by Yiying Lu, it became associated with the site and has its own fan community and merchandise. The FailWhale represents server overload issues and user frustration during site downtime.
The FailWale is an illustrated graphic of a whale supported by a flock of birds. It is perhaps most famously employed during downtime by the social networking service Twitter, which allows users to send and share short messages known colloquially as “tweets.” While FailWhale wasn’t designed specifically for Twitter, it has become so closely associated with the service that many people are unaware of the whale’s origins and designer.
Graphic designer Yiying Lu created FailWhale, originally posting it on a site that allows illustrators and photographers to sell creative creative licenses for their work to people who need stock graphics. In March of 2008, Twitter’s designers were apparently impressed with the design and adopted it for one of the server down messages so that site users would have something to watch while server overload issues were resolved.
Initially, the design didn’t have a formal title, but within days of its adoption, users began colloquially calling it the “Fail Whale” or “FailWhale,” referring to a popular Internet meme built around the word “fail.” It seems that several Twitter users started using the name at the same time, with some major Twitter feeds popularizing the name, causing it to spread like wildfire.
The Twitter staff might be less than happy with FailWhale and what it stands for, but it has acquired its own fan club and fervent fan community. The FailWhale has its own Twitter feed, fan sites, and fan groups on other social networking sites, along with a line of merchandise like T-shirts, stickers, and bags. When Lu realized the popularity of the FailWhale, he also published illustrations of the whale’s girlfriend, Eve Whale, along with other versions of the FailWhale, to please the whale’s fans.
This iconic illustration also points to a serious problem many popular websites experience, as server traffic exceeds the system’s ability to cope with the traffic, causing the site to fail until the problem can be fixed. Users expect services like Twitter to be available all the time, and are often extremely frustrated and irritated by downtime, even when those periods are brief. For Twitter users, FailWhale fan clubs are a way to vent frustration while waiting for the site to return to functionality, even though most users would probably be perfectly happy never to see FailWhale in action again.
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