Twitter said its engineers made a few mistakes in managing the service’s internal networks, creating a resurgence of “fail whales” this week. And it says its efforts to fix those mistakes may not be enough to keep the service running reliably during the biggest World Cup matches coming up this summer.
The “fail whale” is slang for the cute, little whale drawing that shows up whenever the microblogging service is over capacity. It used to show up frequently when Twitter was a young startup two or three years ago, but faded a bit from memory as the company overcame several of its scaling issues.
This week, it came back in full force, and Twitter says a number of issues were to blame. The company said it “put two critical, fast-growing, high-bandwidth components” on the same part of its internal network. It also realized its internal network wasn’t being monitored appropriately and was misconfigured for a short while. The company says it’s in the process of doubling its capacity and rebalancing traffic across its servers.
