If you’ve been on Twitter over the last 3 days, you would surely have encountered the dreaded fail whale (if you don’t know what this is, you’re absolutely not Twitdicted… yet!). Here’s what a fail whale is, and it generally rears its head when Twitter is overcapacity, or not performing as it should.

We’ve just found out via Twitter engineer (@jeanpaul) that the cause of these outages is primarily due to internal sub-networks being over-capacity. He outlines 3 problems and 3 solutions for them. (Read the source article here)

3 PROBLEMS

1. Two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwith components were put on the same segment of the internal
2. The Twitter internal network wasn’t monitored appropriately.
3. Their internal network was temporarily misconfigured.

3 SOLUTIONS

1. Twitter has doubled the capacity of the internal network.
2. They’re improving the monitoring of the internal network.
3. Twitter is rebalancing the traffic on the internal network to redistribute the load.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter has also launched a pretty funky feature to commemorate the World Cup season. It has special pages that filter World Cup related tweets from both teams in play and display them to the audience, LIVE. You can take a look at it here. This surely increases the traffic to Twitter exponentially!

RANDOM FAIL WHALE INFO…

Some enterprising individuals have redrawn variants of the fail whale as shown below. Pretty nifty, huh?

Related articles: High Error Rate on Twitter.com, A Perfect Storm of Whales