If you use Twitter then you will no doubt have come across the Twitter Fail Whale:
This image is met by a number of emotions – derision, annoyance, frustration and fondness. The way in which Twitter has developed has meant that they have gone through periods where they can’t handle the quantity of traffic, so users are shown the whale. As with so many aspects of Twitter, it is the users who coined the term ‘Fail Whale’, rushing to other social media sites to discuss the fact that Twitter was down and what they would do. Such is the obsessiveness that users feel for the site that this image has become something of an icon.
Now other sites are trying emulate the success of failure, by attempting to create their own fail pages. Here is the fail page for the new Digg that I came across this morning:
I’m not convinced that Digg’s users have the same obsessive fondness to make this page iconic, but what other great fail pages are there?
