Welcome to day six of Tweet Week!

Twitter: Fail

You can expect that any growing site will experience growing pains that manifest themselves in varied ways and Twitter has been no exception. In fact, with it’s rapid growth, failure has become a part of the Twitter culture.

It typically begins with “fail whale” sightings. Users begin tweeting sightings and, sometimes shortly thereafter, Twitter will go down, kick into tape delay mode or exhibit various other behavioral problems.

What’s a fail whale? Well, as you’ve probably seen, Twitter uses a bunch of cute pictures for different purposes. The most common, of course, are birds. But, when there is a problem, you’ll see an image of a flock of birds carrying a whale. This has come to be known as the “fail whale” as it indicates that Twitter is failing to load.

When something is “technically wrong,” you’ll see a bird, a robot, a bomb and some clouds.

When Twitter is undergoing database maintenance, you’ll see a caterpillar and an ice cream cone.

If a feature is temporarily disabled, you’ll see the “fail sparrow.”

And, if you don’t see a cute little picture, then you know something is really wrong!

So, on some days, you just have to learn to be patient. Twitter will be back up and running soon!

If you’re ever curious if something is up, you can check the Twitter status page. You can learn about other goings-on on the Twitter blog.

But, usually the first you’ll hear about Twitter problems is from Twitter users! Assuming, of course, that it is possible to tweet or view tweets at all. Otherwise, you’ll need to visit your favorite blogs or Twitter sites to see what’s happening!

That’s all for today. Please pop in tomorrow for the last day of Tweet Week!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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