Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman

Twitter came close to melting down in the same way, but managed to recover in time to build a massive business. When Twitter began its rise in the late 2000s, it became infamous for its “Fail Whale,” a whimsical error message that appeared whenever its servers couldn’t handle the load. Unfortunately for Twitter, the Fail Whale made fairly regular appearances, especially when big news hit, such as the death of the recording artist Michael Jackson in 2009 (to be fair, Twitter was hardly the only website that had these issues when the King of Pop passed away) or the 2010 World Cup. Twitter invested serious resources into rearchitecting both its systems and its engineering processes to be more efficient. Even with this strenuous effort, it took several years to “tame” the Fail Whale; it wasn’t until after Twitter made it through the 2012 US presidential election night without melting down that the company’s then–creative director Doug Bowman announced that the Great Blue Whale had been put to death.