Goodbye, Fail Whale. You’ve been a sore sight for the eyes when you appeared to tell us Twitter was down but we will still remember you fondly for being cute. It has been reported that the Fail Whale has been given the boot and replaced by robots instead.In an interview with Wired, Christopher Fry, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Twitter said that the image that best described the frustrations of the micro-blogging site’s users over the years was being killed. For those of you who’ve only recently joined Twitter, the Fail Whale popped up every time Twitter went over capacity.
Goodbye, Fail Whale!
The Whale almost always looked like it was smiling as it was lifted into the skies by a bunch of Twitter birds. The illustration underwent several slight changes over the year but always contained the same iconic Whale and its pals, the birds.Fry will be setting off a wave of nostalgia with this interview of his. “The Fail Whale is a thing of the past,” he said, adding that Twitter took it out of production this summer. “So if you come to Twitter, and there are always gonna be problems, no service is ever perfect. But right now you will see robots instead of the Fail Whale. So the Fail Whale image is not served by Twitter anymore. It had a long history and some of our users feel very connected to it. But in the end, it did represent a time when I don’t think we lived up to what the world needed Twitter to be.”In a way, Fry hints at the Fail Whale being associated with Twitter’s shortcomings in the interview. He mentions how sometimes Twitter is the only thing that’s available during times of crisis like floods and major disaster and the micro-blogging website hopes to be the most reliable service that it can be. Twitter has indeed been trying its best to stay relevant during times of crisis with tools that help organisations connect with users in order to send them alarms and notifications. Twitter has also tried to assert its position as a reliable service with its IPO hitting the market earlier this month. Maybe the killing off of the cult Fail Whale is tied in to these changes Twitter wants to imbibe within itself, but in any case, Twitter’s older users are going to miss the cute illustration.
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