What was Twitter's famous outage error image called?

Twitter’s famous outage error image was called the “Fail Whale.”

The illustration showed a whale being lifted from the water by eight orange birds using a net. It usually appeared with a message explaining that Twitter was overloaded and asking users to try again. The friendly artwork became a recognizable symbol of Twitter’s early technical growing pains.

The name was not Twitter’s formal product terminology. Web designer and Twitter user Jen Simmons coined “fail whale” in a September 2007 post, and the nickname quickly became widely adopted. Twitter’s outages were especially noticeable in its early years, when rapid growth regularly overwhelmed the service.

The artwork itself was created by Yiying Lu and was based on her earlier design, “Lifting a Dreamer.” A common mix-up is to confuse the image’s nickname with a generic “crash” or “error bird” label. Twitter eventually retired the Fail Whale as the platform became more stable; by 2013, company engineering leaders said it was no longer in regular use.