We went searching for the Twitter Fail Whale, testing Twitter page load time from 12 worldwide locations. Here are the results from our website monitoring testing quest.
When Twitter is over capacity and the “Fail Whale” error message signals another Twitter outage or slows to an elephant crawl, it’s not a surprise to many Twitter users anymore. Over the years, Twitter performance has struggled to handle its rapidly growing capacity. Interestingly, the “Fail Whale” was originally drawn featuring an elephant (not a whale) in 2002 by an China-born artist named Yiying Lu. Yiying created the Fail Whale as a “visual comfort” greeting of love to friends she was missing and had originally titled the drawing “Lifting a Dreamer.”
For many the Fail Whale has become more than a herald of downtime at the biggest social media network in the world. It has become a “social object” owned by its fans. On the one hand, Twitter downtime, and slow Twitter website load speed have an impact on worldwide communications. On the other, Fail Whale fans have embraced it as an extension of the Twitter brand with expressions of endearment even while it signals an interruption to a service they value.
With that in mind, we went looking for the Fail Whale ourselves. We spent several days monitoring the Dotcom-Monitor Twitter Page at 5-minute intervals using BrowserView Monitoring™, employing an Internet Explorer browser from 12 worldwide location to test page speed. Our search didn’t reveal a sighting of the dreamy beast, nor an instance of Twitter downtime, but it did provide 21,600 tests of actual Twitter web performance for analysis.
Below are the results from our website monitoring tests. For a free instant test of your own Twitter page load times, try our Free Worldwide Website Speed Test.
![Searching for the Fail Whale: Worldwide Twitter Page Speed Testing [infographic]](https://www.dotcom-monitor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2012/10/Twitter_IFGR_rev.png "Searching for the Fail Whale: Worldwide Twitter Page Speed Testing [infographic]")
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