"Fail whale" is a well-used term for a reason. Twitter has always been known for low reliability. It got better, though, but still nowhere near Facebook etc.
I don't mind internet services being down from time to time. What I mind is services that are unreliable, that acts as if they were working while they're not. The fail whale was there from time to time (I've seen my share of her, I've been on Twitter since early 2007), but this time it is different. It's not a "oops something is broken, we're on it and the service will be back soon, sorry" situation. It's a "everything is going wrong and we don't even know if the people who can fix things are still there" situation.
Haven't seen the Fail Whale in some time. But Facebook has been glitching terribly the last few months on desktop — mobile is smooth, but desktop has been acting very weird.
Indeed, it used to be constantly broken in the early 2010s. But I believe it was quite stable by the time it started regaining relevance again with Trump.
"Fail whale" is a well-used term for a reason. Twitter has always been known for low reliability. It got better, though, but still nowhere near Facebook etc.