Extreme heat in California 'knocked out' Twitter’s data center, says report

The Sacramento data center of Twitter was knocked out by extreme heat that exhausted California’s electric grid, as per a CNN report. However, a Twitter spokesperson declined to answer questions related to it.

According to a report, one of the main data centers of Twitter in Sacramento was knocked out on Labor day because California’s overworked eclectic grid was exhausted by extreme heat.

During the outage on September 5, Twitter leaned on its other data centers in Atlanta, Portland, and Ore. to avoid the shutdown and keep its system running. And according to an internal memo acquired by CNN, a company executive gave a warning that some users would have been incapable of accessing Twitter if another center were lost.


That day in Sacramento, the temperature record of 114 degrees was broken as by afternoon. The thermometers were up to 116 degrees.

Tech companies such as Google, Meta, or Twitter count on data centers to power their online services to users. For that, these data centers require heavy loads of power, which generate large amounts of heat, and to keep things running, a cooling system is required.

What does the Twitter outage underscore?
Twitter’s outage stresses how extreme weather conditions affect an online system that billions of people worldwide rely on every day as climate change is continuously heating the planet.

To address the issue, some U.S.-based companies have established data centers in countries with cooler climates. In Finland, for example, Google has built a data center.




Similar outages with other companies:
Oracle’s cloud-based system and Google Cloud data centers in London were knocked out in July when a record-breaking heat scorched the United Kingdom. As a result, customers' access to online services was off for nearly an entire day.

According to a CNN report, Twitter’s vice president of engineering Carrie Fernandez wrote to Twitter engineers through an internal message last Friday that due to extreme weather, the Sacramento(SMF) data center was lost on September 5. He added that Twitter experienced a “total shutdown of physical equipment” on that day in SMF.

Carrie warned engineers that if Twitter loses “one of those remaining datacenters”, then all users won’t be served with traffic.

In a whistleblower complaint, the former security chief of Twitter, Peiter Zatko, warned that a failure of even minor overlapping data centers could turn out to be catastrophic or risk its existence.

FAQ:

What causes data center outages?
Mainly the infrastructure equipment failure and human error cause it.

How many data centers does the USA have?
The United States has about 3 million data centers.