Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, a consumer electronics retailer that declared bankruptcy in 2007, saw its share price balloon on Friday thanks to confused traders who thought they were buying into the newly announced stock offering from Twitter. Of course, Twitter shares aren't yet available for public purchase, but that didn't halt millions of transactions in the moribund Tweeter stock, which trades under the initialism TWTRQ, close but not the same as Twitter's upcoming TWTR ticker. Trading in Tweeter shares was halted upon realization of the mass confusion, though not before the price reached a high of 15 times its typical valuation of a single cent.

Perhaps most egregious about this entire episode is the fact, as noted by CNN Money, that the letter Q is appended to the stock symbol of a company involved in bankruptcy proceedings — and there's a clearly worded SEC warning about that fact — so all the traders involved really and truly should have known better. Still, we can't think of any better real-world manifestation of the Twitter fail whale graphic above.