Twitter has brought out the harpoon.

There was once an exciting time where we actually hoped Twitter would go down. No, not for a long time, but just long enough so we could bask in the glory of the Fail Whale. 

For you sad, young teenagers or social media noobs who didn't have the pleasure of meeting the Fail Whale's glory, it was once a magical sign Twitter put up when the site had gone down. It was prevalent in 2008 - 2011, as the growing start-up often failed to keep servers up thanks to the sheer volume of tweets hitting the net. We have several stories about such occasion. What momentous occasions. 

Sadly, the Fail Whale is now a thing of the past. Christopher Fry, senior vice-president of engineering at Twitter, has confirmed the Fail Whale has been replaced. In an interview with Wired, the executive said robots are now the "over capacity" sign of choice. 

"The Fail Whale is a thing of the past," Fry told Wired. "Actually, this summer we took the Fail Whale out of production. So if you come to Twitter, and there are always gonna be problems, no service is ever perfect. But right now you will see robots instead of the Fail Whale. So the Fail Whale image is not served by Twitter anymore. It had a long history and some of our users feel very connected to it. But in the end, it did represent a time when I don’t think we lived up to what the world needed Twitter to be."

The post-IPO world is cruel, ladies and gentleman. 

We've compiled a collectionof Fail Whale images in a gallery to remember such fond times.