The extreme heat that exhausted California’s overloaded power grid on Labor Day brought down one of Twitter’s main data centers in Sacramento, according to a report.
While Twitter avoided a shutdown on Sept. 5 by relying on other data centers in Portland, Ore. and Atlanta during the outage to keep its systems up and running, a company executive warned that if another hub went down, some users would have been unable to access the social media platform, according to an internal memo obtained from CNN.
Temperatures in Sacramento on Labor Day broke a daily record of 114 degrees, with thermometers hitting 116 by the afternoon.
To power their online services to users, technology companies such as Twitter, Google or Meta rely on data centers that can require large energy loads and often generate large amounts of heat, requiring cooling systems to cool them down. keep things running. As climate change continues to warm the planet, the Twitter outage highlights how such extreme weather affects online systems that billions of people rely on every day.
To handle the heat strain on such internet infrastructure, some US-based companies have moved their data centers to colder climates, such as Google, which built a data center in Finland.
A record heat wave that scorched the United Kingdom in July brought down Google Cloud data centers as well as Oracle’s cloud-based system, both of which are based in London. These outages left customers unable to access online services for nearly an entire day.
A Twitter spokesman told The Times on Monday that there was no disruption to people’s ability to access or use its app, but declined to answer questions about the outage highlighted in the CNN report.
“On September 5, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento data center (SMF) region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in a total shutdown of physical equipment at SMF,” Carrie Fernandez, the company’s vice president of engineering, wrote last Friday in an internal message to Twitter engineers, CNN reported.
“If we lose one of those remaining data centers, we may not be able to serve the traffic of all Twitter users,” Fernandez warned.
Although big tech companies have multiple data centers so that if one center fails, another can continue its service, Twitter’s former security chief Peiter Zatko, who was fired this year, warned in a whistleblower complaint about the fragility of the company’s data centers where “even a small overlapping data center failure” could raise “the risk of a brief outage to that of a catastrophic and existential risk to Twitter’s survival” .
Such overlapping outages “would likely result in the service going offline for weeks, months or forever,” the complaint said.
Zeitko was expected to address the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
