Twitter Error Messages

About a month ago, I started using the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter.  To date, I’ve encountered four different error messages (see screenshots below), listed in descending order of frequency:

• “Twitter is over capacity.” (a.k.a., “fail whale“)
• “That page doesn’t exist!”
• “Something is technically wrong.”
• “Who goes there?”

For the most part, the error messages provide appropriate feedback, as suggested by both Jacob Nielsen (“Error Message Guidelines“) and Donald Norman (“The Design of Everyday Things“).  The one message that could provide more informative feedback to users is “Something is technically wrong.”  The only explanation I could find for this error message on Twitter’s blog came from the “Timeline Oddity Update” post:

“We were testing a new application server tonight that didn’t work right so we rolled it back.  Lots of folks saw an error page while we were fixing the bug – which is a bummer.”

and

“While we’re working on this, you might see the “Something is technically wrong” page.”

Unfortunately, now that I use the application TweetDeck to send and receive “tweets,” I’ll no longer receive error messages, thus being deprived of appropriate feedback, unless I access the service from their website.

BTW, I’d be interested in hearing from others if you’ve encountered additional error messages besides the ones I’ve listed.