Can't anybody tell that the fail whale is hungry?

(Credit: Flickr user Victoria Belanger)

Something has been rocking the boat over at Twitter, where stability issues on Monday afternoon caused the company to temporarily take down Twitter Lists, a popular and relatively new feature that lets members group Twitter accounts into categories.

'We began experiencing a very high rate of errors and we are working on the underlying problem,' a post on the Twitter status blog read. It was later updated saying, 'We are now recovering from this unexpected downtime. The Lists feature is temporarily unavailable as we diagnose the cause of the outage.'

Many members had reported sightings of the 'fail whale,' Twitter's error message featuring a cartoon whale, earlier on Monday. It may have been more noticeable than usual because of the day's status as 'Cyber Monday,' a big day for holiday e-commerce deals--which in this day and age means plenty of people hunting on retailers' Twitter accounts for fire-sale promotions.

Obviously, amid all the seasonal shopaholism, somebody forgot to feed the whale.

Source: Hungry fail wha...