Twitter’s data center knocked out by extreme heat in California
Twitter’s data center knocked out by extreme heat in California
An image of a Twitter’s data center (Twitter logo) has become completely black. The Twitter logo on a screen above a building in Mountain View, California, after it was completely destroyed by extreme heat on July 10. The Twitter logo came back on, but with very little life left in it. (Michael Buckner/Reuters)
There was a Twitter’s data center in the San Francisco area, which opened up in 2010 and is still operational today. It had a capacity to serve more than 65 million users and its operations are completely automated and can be scaled up or down as desired. When this data center lost power, it took down all its services.
The data center was fully operational, but Twitter couldn’t reach anyone to get the situation resolved. It had to start all over from square one with an entirely brand-new data center. That’s what the company did.
Twitter’s communications team tweeted about the outage and gave the location of the affected facility. A minute later, a tweet from the Twitter PR team came back confirming the outage was the result of extreme heat.
There was nothing they could do about it. The facility’s generator was out of power for much of the day and a temporary power source was not available. They had to manually switch the facility back on.
There are no customers and no revenue in any kind of way. There was no way for Twitter to reach anyone to let them know it wasn’t just a temporary outage.
The company lost a lot of data, the data of all the tweets in their universe that made it to Twitter.com, the service’s database of 140 character messages. That’s a lot of messages for a place of this size to handle. There’s probably more tweets than there are people who use it all the time.
This is a disaster for Twitter. The company is losing one of the most valuable services they have, the ability to read messages going out to their users. That’s about to take a huge hit.
There have been a number of data center outages caused by extreme heat in the past. That’s a fact.
The San Francisco facility was one of the biggest failures of its kind for a number of years. It’s been operating with a skeleton crew for