Who created Twitter's Fail Whale illustration?

Yiying Lu created Twitter’s Fail Whale illustration.

Lu originally designed the artwork as a digital piece titled “Lifting a Dreamer,” showing a serene whale being lifted from the ocean by orange birds. She posted the image to iStock, where Twitter co-founder Biz Stone discovered it and thought it suited the service. In May 2008, Twitter began using it as the image users saw during outages.

The design became famous because Twitter experienced frequent service interruptions while its audience was expanding rapidly. Its cheerful, whimsical appearance softened an otherwise frustrating error message, helping turn a technical failure into a memorable piece of internet culture.

Lu was an artist and designer based in Sydney at the time, not a Twitter executive or software engineer. That distinction explains why the other names in the quiz can be tempting: Biz Stone helped bring the artwork to Twitter, but he did not draw it. Lu later became known for other work, including several Unicode food and drink emoji designs.