Twitter Down: The Fail Whale Returns After A Long Absence

By Dave Smith | January 31 2013 10:43 AM

It was nearly three months ago when, after the presidential election results sent Twitter into a tweeting frenzy, its creative director, Doug Bowman, made a bold call about the strength of the platform and its engineering team: “RIP, Fail Whale.”

Courtesy / Twitter.com

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Now, on the last day of January, the Fail Whale has returned, and Twitter is back down.

The appearance of the Fail Whale is certainly out of character for Twitter, which has had several smooth months of uninterrupted service. Last year, Twitter experienced a few embarrassing outages, but luckily none around the times of important events, such as Election Night (Nov. 8), New Year’s Eve, or even when Beyonce announced her baby.

“The bottom line,” Twitter’s engineering chief, Mazen Rawashdeh, said in a blog post. “No matter when, where or how people use Twitter, we need to remain accessible 24/7, around the world.”

We’ll update this article as soon as we know more about the outage, when service resumes, and what exactly went wrong. Twitter did not immediately respond to our request for comment.