Which artist created Twitter’s famous Fail Whale illustration?

Yiying Lu created Twitter’s famous Fail Whale illustration.

Lu is a Taiwanese-Australian artist and designer whose work became globally known after Twitter used her whale-and-birds image during outages. The illustration depicted a white whale being carried above water by a group of red birds, giving users a memorable visual explanation for an unavailable service.

The image was licensed and used by Twitter rather than originally being designed as a permanent corporate logo. Its popularity grew because Twitter suffered noticeable reliability problems while its user base was expanding rapidly in the late 2000s.

A common mix-up is to attribute the Fail Whale to Twitter’s design team or to confuse it with the company’s blue bird logo. Lu created the outage illustration, while Twitter’s bird branding had separate designers and names over the company’s history.