Updated 4:30 p.m. ET: Twitter.com appears to be fully up and running.
Updated 2:50 p.m. ET: Twitter.com seems to be slowly coming back online, and the art, while seldom seen, appears to be several years old.
Original post: Twitter, the most popular tool for firing quick utterances across the globe, has buckled under. Our guess: It's strained by too many international "Happy New Year!" tweets. But in its failing, Twitter did leave us something: New "down for maintenance" art.
While Twitter's main website is down, there's still a chance you can get tweets through using apps or the mobile site. As for the cause of the outage, a link to the Twitter status microblog turns up only this message: "Users may currently be experiencing some site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue." Hopefully the trouble will be remedied soon; we will keep checking.
In the meantime, we have the new imagery. As you can see above, the iconic Fail Whale of yore has been replaced. By an ice cream cone talking to a caterpillar.
My biggest question, one that I can't use Twitter to ask at the moment, is: What do we call this new fail screen? Fail Whale was easy, almost too easy. Naming this bizarro scene is causing me brain freeze. The best I can do is "Cone of Failure," but I bet you can do better. Share it below if you can't share it on Twitter.
More Twitter news from msnbc.com:
- Lawsuit raises 'Who owns your Twitter account?' issue
- Twitter users shamed for whiny Christmas tweets
- Twitter starts rolling out Facebook-like features
Catch up with Wilson on Twitter at @wjrothman (if it's not out of service), or on Google+. And join our conversation on Facebook.