The Tumbeasts were created by Matthew Inman, the artist behind The Oatmeal, as a playful alternative to Tumblr’s standard error messages during site outages in early 2011. Designed to replace the 'Fail Whale' concept, these colorful, multi-eyed creatures are famously depicted chewing on server cables and hardware, humorously suggesting that technical difficulties are actually the result of monsters eating the internet. The characters became a beloved symbol of Tumblr's early infrastructure struggles and are now used as a nostalgic template to represent server crashes, technical failures, or general chaos in the digital world.