Twitter fail-whale snacks on user avatars

The Fail Whale ate your Twitter user icon for lunch and now it's too heavy to lift.

(Credit: Twitter)

Twitter has been hiccuping all day, it seems. Earlier, some users (myself included) noticed occurrences of the service's notorious "fail whale"--the cartoon that pops up when Twitter's servers are overloaded--and later, some members began to report that their profile pictures had disappeared and were replaced by Twitter's default icon.

As they say at Fark, everybody panic!

Well, not really. Twitter CEO Evan Williams acknowledged the issue, saying "if you're missing your icon/avatar, please excuse -- will be back shortly!" in a Twitter post. As of Monday afternoon, some of them are still MIA, and Twitter hasn't said what the exact issue is. But, from what it sounds like, the avatars are not gone forever.

The irony? I navigated to Williams' profile page shortly after 4 p.m. PT, and his own avatar was down. Maybe it was just for solidarity.

Twitter's outage problems were notorious in its early days, regularly downing its servers and spawning rumors that hardware issues had led to the ouster of one of its top engineers. Major outages are now rare at Twitter.

Update: We wanted to note that the "fail whale" art was created by Yiying Lu.

[skillingssucks]

Great headline!

[gotaghost]

Caroline... I think you're a pretty girl and all, but, really, who cares? #everyhightrafficsitehasproblems

[mrcjacobs]

This "hiccup" affected me earlier. Twitter has been acting wonky for a few days now.

[xsiteable]

"Major outages are now rare at Twitter" - ummmm apparently you haven't been on lately! This last statement is disturbing to me since I've seen that damn whale all day today!! It's to a point now where I'm about to give up on Twitter altogether.

[Jack K1]

It looks like the indexer is working overtime to rebuild indices without using actual down-time. Since the data store is intact, the problem will correct itself; probably overnight.

[Bytrat]

Ahhh! - We're just twitterpated. Please hold on while we get un-twitterpated.

[techdribble]

if I see the fail whale again today I half expect to a japanese "scientific" whale boat to show up.

[Hunnter2k3]

Look at that whale, loving it.
Who wouldn't want to eat all those yummy avatars?

Hm, that sounded a bit wrong in my head, but whatever.

[Harrison912]

I'm typically on Twitter to raise awareness for my safety and security products so I'm always interested in what's happening there. With Twitter getting even more popular every day, I'm surprised we're not seeing more of the whale. It's frustrating but comes with growth. Thanks, Caroline, for this report.

[TV James]

They've been silo-ing processes so that they can have smaller whales that only show up on part of the page while another part continues to work. Perhaps all these missing avatars should have been replaced with whales until fixed.

Oh, boo hoo, my photo's gone. I want my money back, Twitter! I'm not getting the service I paid f... oh, wait.

[surrealjohn]

There has been a few glitches with Twitter over the weeks.

Twitter may be a free to use but so are the other big social networking sites and Twitter has to make sure they don't get too many of these glitches.