oops…

…this is not the page you were hoping for…

But since you’re here…it may be the perfect opportunity to present a gallery of classic 404 Fails. Ready?

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The Fail Whale - Twitter

Designed by the talented Yiying Lu (an Australian graphic designer), Twitter bought this image off of iStock Photo and used it as their 404. The original title of the illustration was “Lifting a Dreamer” and it was never intended to become the universal symbol of user frustration.

In fact, Lu herself spoke up in protest of the branding of her artwork. In a Mashable interview in 2010, she said, "...I hate the name Fail Whale. Really, I do hate it ... I'm like, "It’s not a Fail Whale, it’s like, originally, just a message for my friends far away and it has absolutely nothing to do with failure.""

 
 

clogged tubes - Flickr

In 2006, a Republican Senator named Ted Stevens gave an impassioned speech against Net Neutrality where he explained to his colleagues that the internet is a “series of tubes” that could get “clogged up” by too much content and claimed that his emails were taking longer to get to them because of this.

The nerdy community had a heyday with this uninformed metaphor and, soon after, the web was filled with jokes at Stevens’ expense. Flickr, being a core part of the “Web 2.0” tribe jumped on this bandwagon and switched out their previous 404 where Flickr was just having a massage.

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