Twitter’s “Fail Whale” Got World Cup Face-Time

The World Cup brought a massive influx to the Twitter system. As seen many times before from the four-year-old company, an influx in traffic almost always results in a visit from the so-called fail whale.

An image of blue whale being carried away in a net by birds, the fail whale has become a pop icon synonymous with service interruptions and malfunctions. Despite its early bad reputation, Twitter, established in March of 2006, has worked hard to get a handle on its outage issues.

However, usage has increased at a rapid rate — with 2 billion status updates in June alone, according to Pingdom. The traffic is causing Twitter to re-evaluate its systems and discover some serious bugs in the system.

In a blog post on Twitter’s website, the company listed key factors to the recent outages including a spike in usage due to the World Cup as well as additional bugs found during short-term and long-term system improvements and upgrades.

“From a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October,” spokesman Sean Garrett stated. “As we go through this process, we have uncovered unexpected deeper issues and have even caused inadvertent downtime as a result of our attempts to make changes. Ultimately, the changes that we are making now will make Twitter much more reliable in the future. However, we certainly are not happy about the disruptions that we have faced and even caused this week and understand how they negatively impact our users.”

Twitter has blamed the recent issues on the faulty planning, monitoring, and configuration of its internal network and that they were addressing these issues by doubling the network’s capacity, fine-tuning its monitoring, and re-calibrating its load balancing. According to partial data from the month of June, Twitter was down for over 5 hours — the worst outage since August 2009, when Twitter was unavailable for almost 7 hours according to Pingdom. While major overhauls are being preformed to improve the user experience at Twitter, the reality is that the problems are likely to get worse before they get better.

Looking to find a way to generate revenue for the site, Twitter began an advertising program in Aprile to offer “promoted tweets.” The website charges businesses to have their tweets displayed at the top of search results. The social-networking site has already landed some heavy hitters including Best Buy (BBY), Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, and Starbucks (SBUX). However, any future service interruptions may prevent other companies from spending valuable advertising dollars on an unreliable system.