section_path: Technology/Outages
section_name: Outages
paragraph_text: Outages
  
  During an outage, Twitter users were at one time shown the "fail whale" error message image created by Yiying Lu, illustrating eight orange birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again." Web designer and Twitter user Jen Simmons was the first to coin the term "fail whale" in a September 2007 tweet. In a November 2013 Wired interview Chris Fry, VP of Engineering at that time, noted that the company had taken the "fail whale" out of use as the platform was now more stable. Twitter had approximately 98% uptime in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime). The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.