Fail Whale, Epic Fail, and Other Stories of Missing the Mark

Web_Guy: You know about Twitter, right?

Girly_Love: The micro-blogging site? Yeah, sure. Use it a lot.

Web_Guy: Yeah, well, the site's been down so frequently--and I mean, so frequently that the folks over at Twitter post a picture of a whale being lifted by the little Twitter birds to notify users that there are problems. So that's been happening so often, that we now say Fail Whale to represent anything technical that fails.

Girly_Love: Fail Whale. Poor thing. Poor Twitter.

Web_Guy: Yeah, I know, it's rough being Web 2.0. Users are in control. What they want is what they get, 24 hours a day, 7 days week, even if the site's infrastructure cannot handle the load. It's gotta be running or else. :P

Girly_Love: You'd think they would have anticipated these things. :D

Web_Guy: Yeah, you'd think. But, man, nobody thought Twitter would fly. Seriously.

Girly_Love: Oh my God. I see what's wrong. They forgot to add beta to Twitter. Look, see? No beta. ;-)

Web_Guy: You're right. [LOL]

Girly_Love: Hey, check it out. I got an iPhone 3G. Isn't he so cute? I call him iPhoney Maloney.

Web_Guy: Sweet. Too expensive for me, though. What did you say you called it...?

Girly_Love: iPhoney Maloney. I used to call him iBrick because that's what it was after I bought it and could not download the updates to the firmware. It basically became a brick. An iBrick.

Web_Guy: Rough. What happened?

Girly_Love: You know, the iTunes servers crashed and burned. They couldn't handle the demand of thousands and thousands of users.

Web_Guy: Epic Fail.

Girly_Love: Totally Epic Fail. So horrible. Sigh. But I so love my iPhone. He's so touchy. [grin]

Web_Guy: Oh puh-lease. Listen, I gotta roll. Gonna try and download Firefox 3. Rave reviews, but on download day, the...

Girly_Love: ...the servers crashed and burned. Yep, I heard. Good luck.

Web_Guy: Thanks. No more Fail Whales or Epic Fails--

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