Twitter’s whale illustration shown during service outages was called the Fail Whale.
The image showed a white whale being lifted by red birds above water. Artist Yiying Lu created it, and Twitter used it during periods when the site was overloaded or unavailable. The picture quickly became one of the most recognizable symbols of Twitter’s early technical problems.
The Fail Whale was not an official product feature or mascot. It was an error illustration associated with downtime, much like other websites’ server-error graphics. Users often treated its appearance humorously, especially when Twitter experienced repeated outages during its rapid growth.
Twitter eventually became more reliable as its infrastructure expanded, so the illustration appeared less often. The phrase remains part of early Twitter history and is sometimes confused with the company’s blue bird branding.