twitter_fail_whaleI used to think that Twitter was mainly up and available for everybody and that now and then it would just go down for everybody. Sounds logical right?

Earlier today I got the famous ‘Fail Whale’ message and went over to search.twitter.com to see if it had been down for long and noticed that it seems to be showing the Fail Whale around the clock and with a seemingly regular beat to it too.

It seems that about every few minutes someone using Twitter sees the “Twitter is over capacity” message. About a hundred people tweet about Twitter being ‘Over capacity’ every 24 hours (yes I went back 80 pages to get to find out) so that will probably mean that thousands see the error every day and simply ignore it.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad news. It could mean that the system is always pushing its boundaries and won’t be able to scale much as it is now.
Or it could mean that Twitter is doing fine and it only shows error for a handful of users and only in rare circumstances.

I personally haven’t been confronted with the Fail Whale for months now. Well, until yesterday. So I’m hoping it is actually a good sign. What do you think?

Live search for “Twitter is over capacity”: