Do you twitter? If you do, then you’ve likely encountered the fail whale.

The fail whale is a symbol known round the world. It means twitter is over-extended and can’t possibly handle one more tweet–yours. It means the whole site has shut down. At least to you.

I tell you this first, to explain to you why I’ve experience my own personal fail whale. In case you haven’t noticed, my website has been inaccessible for the better part of a week. Yup. Clean shut down.

Turns out that more than a year ago I posted a certain picture on my blog. And last week the site from which I borrowed said picture decided it wasn’t okay for me to be using it. (Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Don’t borrow anything that isn’t up for being borrowed.) So they sent a letter to the server for my website, telling us to remove the picture or shut the site down.

Well, we didn’t get the letter until about 3 days later. By which time my site had already been shut down.

We finally got in touch with the right folks, took the picture down, and all is good to go. So we’re back. (You couldn’t get rid of me that easily!)

So the picture that made my whole site fail? A famous killer whale.