Is Twitter too big to fail? That whale can’t afford it.

If you are reading this site (a news blog about mobiles) then you almost certainly know what the Fail Whale is. If not, here’s the short version: it’s the image of a whale that heralds a Twitter crash. This doesn’t just cause a sudden panic amongst people who can’t live without Twitter - it also generates genuine revenue loss for the thousands of services that run on the Twitter API, and hurts Twitters over-all image.

The cause of the most recent Twitter crash was “too many tweets”. Bill Gates joined Twitter, and a vast horde of people rushed to follow him. Then Twitter went boom. The last person to achieve this was Oprah.

But it’s not just Bill. The volume of Tweets concerning Haiti have been huge. These two factors are generally attributed with causing the fail.

Too big to fail?

It’s easy to shrug ones shoulders and say “so it went down for a few hours, no biggie.” But unfortunately Twitter doesn’t really have that luxury anymore. It is actually too important as a service now - or, more accurately, the dependability of Twitter will become more and more essential as it grows. Twitter is huge, and it shows no sign of shrinking any time soon. There are even entire devices dedicated to it. If it can’t handle the traffic it has invited, then any time two or more large events happen we’ll get failures. And people don’t like that.