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by chrisbaker98 1273 days ago
Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.
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The SuperNews documentary on Twitter elaborates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ff2X_3P_4&t=168s