"Fail whale" is the image you see when twitter is down. In technical terms its called an outage.
June 12, 2009, in what was called a potential "Twitpocalypse", the unique numerical identifier associated with each tweet exceeded the limit of 32-bit signed integers (2,147,483,647 total messages).While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients could no longer access recent tweets. Source : wikipedia
The twitter "fail whale" is an image of several red birds trying to carry a whale using a net. The elegant illustration was created by Yiying Lu.
You can check out the status of twitter at http://status.twitter.com/ , the funny thing is that even the status page has a retweet option.
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