( CNN ) -- The popular site Twitter crashed again on Wednesday morning . The microblogging site was down for about an hour and a half , with service restored at about 8 a.m . ET . During the outage , the site 's users saw an `` extremely high volume of whales , '' the company said in a blog post . When Twitter breaks , a cartoon whale -- nicknamed a `` fail whale '' -- pops up on computer screens instead of the functioning site . The fail whale has become an iconic symbol for Twitter , and a way for the company to try to embrace and make light of its shortcomings . `` A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes , '' Twitter wrote in a post to its status blog . `` This made the site largely inaccessible . No data was lost or compromised during this outage . '' Wednesday 's down time was the first major outage at Twitter since it and other sites were attacked in early August , according to reports . `` Reliability has been an ongoing project for Twitter as the service has scaled up to handle growing traffic , '' Rich Miller wrote on the blog Data Center Knowledge . Mashable 's Ben Parr wrote that news from Haiti may have contributed . `` What exactly took down the microblogging service , we do n't know ( some speculate that a wave of tweets due to this morning 's 6.1 earthquake in Haiti could be partly responsible ) , '' he wrote . On Twitter , some users made light of the situation after service was restored . `` @ BillGates joined the twitterverse , '' one user wrote . `` Rough seas out here , I hope the Fail Whale wo n't eat him : P : D '' Twitter , a Web site where users post 140-character messages to their public followers , was founded in May 2007 . It grew at breakneck pace last year and experienced a number of outages as a result . Some online writers have speculated that the Web site 's traffic has started to slow or decline in recent weeks . In a Twitter post on January 12 , company CEO Evan Williams wrote that the site continues to grow . `` Across all metrics that matter , yesterday was Twitter 's highest-usage day ever . ( And today will be bigger . ) , '' he wrote .
The popular site Twitter crashed on Wednesday morning . During the crash viewers saw an `` extremely high volume of whales '' A cartoon whale appears on the site when it has service issues . Reports say this is the first big crash for Twitter since an attack in August .