Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.

The commenter likely meant “fail whale”[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages

No, op didnt