Twitter Data Center Goes Offline Due To Heat Wave In California: fear of total failure

The weather in the US state of California is apparently becoming a problem for operators of large data centers there. Even the data center of the micro-blogging service Twitter recently went down when temperatures in the region rose sharply.

Like the portal CNN Business reported, on September 5, 2022, Twitter’s data center in the city of Sacramento experienced an outage due to the inability of the cooling system to adequately cool the facility in the face of extreme ambient temperatures. The company has now informed its employees in an internal circular.

Twitter is in a “non-redundant” state

According to Carrie Fernandez, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, the extremely hot weather that day caused all systems at Twitter’s Sacramento data center to shut down, CNN quoted as saying in the letter. The data center is apparently still not up and running at the moment.

As a result of the Sacramento outage, Twitter is currently in a “non-redundant” state, although the company’s other two data centers in Atlanta, Georgia, and Portland, Oregon remain operational. If another data center fails for any reason, you may no longer be able to make your offer available to all users.

Modifications are prohibited until Sacramento is up and running again

The engineering boss, therefore, issued a ban on all changes in productive operation. That means developers aren’t allowed to make any new features or changes to Twitter, whether for the web or app variants of the service. The ban will apply until Twitter has resolved all issues with the Sacramento data center and made it fully operational again, it said.

The lack of redundancy due to too few server locations was also one of the criticisms that former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had previously expressed to US media in his statements about Twitter’s internal problems. He warned of a total failure of Twitter, which could last for days, weeks, months or even permanently if problems arise due to a lack of redundancy. So far, it is not officially clear how many data centers Twitter operates worldwide.

Although the locations in Sacramento and Atlanta are known, outside the company it is not known exactly how many other locations there are or exactly how the infrastructure of the service is structured. Amazon announced some time ago that Twitter had become a customer of its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to outsource at least part of its offering to it.