The fail whale, that whimsical image Twitter that instantly signals the site is having technical difficulties, was discovered on a stock photo service by one of the company’s founders, reports the New York Times.
In 2008, Biz Stone, one of the creators of the micro-blogging site, was looking for an image the Twitter could display when it wasn’t working, and the whale caught his eye.
The whale is the creation of Yiying Lu, an artist who was born in Shanghai and studied at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design. She would send the whale sketch to friends on their birthdays, and she uploaded the picture to iStockphoto.com for a small licencing fee, NYT reports.
She wasn’t compensated with any stock, and she hasn’t made any money off of Twitter’s highly-successful IPO this week, she says. In fact, for a long time she didn’t even know the site was using her whale.
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