The image of a whale being carried by a number of birds that appears when the Twitter website is overloaded or has failed. Failwhale appears to now have his/her own fanclub.

Word origin: from fail + whale (probably for rhyming purposes).

The logo of the microblogging service Twitter, displayed prominently on its error page signifying server overload. Fail Whale is a common occurrence.

A twits nightmare.

A annoying blue whale that turns up on the homescreen when popular social networking site Twitter goes overcapacity.
It is depicted as being carried by a flock of blue birds (the Twitter "mascots") to show that the load taken by the microblogging site is to huge to be processed.

In my opinion, it's plain irritating.

a giant whale which appears at times of epic fail.

Extreme fail, usually said after something you strongly disapprove of.

A beached whale.