Twitter's California data centre failed due to extreme heat, report
The company says there has been no disruption to its services
An extreme heat event in California on 5th September triggered an outage at a crucial Twitter data centre in Sacramento, leaving the popular social media network vulnerable in the event of another outage at one of the company's other data centres.
According to an internal memo obtained by CNN, Twitter avoided a shutdown during that outage by relying on its data centres in Portland and Atlanta to keep its systems running. However, a company executive warned that if one of those data centre had been lost, some users would not have been able to access the social media platform.
"On September 5th, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) datacenter region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in the total shutdown of physical equipment in SMF," Carrie Fernandez, the company's vice president of engineering, said in the internal memo to Twitter engineers on Friday.
According to Fernandez's message, Twitter was in a "non-redundant state" as a consequence of the Sacramento outage.
She explained that while data centres in Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia, were still functioning, Twitter might not be able to support all of its users if one of those two data centres stops working.
The message said that non-essential updates to Twitter's software were prohibited until the firm could completely restart its data centre services in Sacramento.
In a statement to CNN, Twitter said that there "have been no disruptions impacting the ability for people to access and use Twitter at this time."
September 5 marked the beginning of one of Northern California's most severe heat waves. On Labour Day, temperatures in Sacramento shattered the previous day record of 114 F (45.5 C), with thermometers eventually reaching 116 F (46.5 C) degrees by the afternoon.
Twitter has yet to announce the current status of the Sacremento facility.
Tech firms like Twitter, Google and Meta rely on data centres to power their customers' online services. These facilities may use a lot of electricity and often produce a lot of heat, necessitating the usage of cooling systems to keep everything functioning smoothly.
As the planet continues to become hotter as a result of global warming, Twitter outages demonstrates how severe weather may disrupt internet services on which billions of people depend on a daily basis.
Similar outages have lately been reported by other tech giants.
In July, Google was forced to shut its London data centre during the UK's recent record-breaking temperatures to prevent further downtime, as its cooling systems had failed. Oracle also faced cooling-related failures of its servers as a result of the heat.
Twitter operates data centres in a number of different cities across the United States for redundancy, storing replicated data to prevent data loss and total site outages.
In a whistleblower complaint last month to several federal government agencies, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Peiter Zatko, the former head of security at Twitter, warned of Twitter's "insufficient data centre redundancy."
"Even a temporary but overlapping outage of a small number of data centers would likely result in the service [Twitter] going offline for weeks, months, or permanently," Zatko's whistleblower disclosure states.
Zatko accused Twitter of misleading regulators about its attempts to safeguard the platform.
He also alleged that Twitter management hid information concerning Twitter's many data breaches and poor user data security.