Twitter's data center goes down with record heat and is on the verge of service outage

A record-breaking heat wave reaching 45 degrees Celsius was observed in the western United States, including California and Arizona. The American news media CNN reports that Twitter's data center has completely shut down due to this heat wave.

Extreme California heat knocks key Twitter data center offline - CNN
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/12/tech/twitter-data-center-california-heat-wave/

Twitter admits US datacenter melted down in Labor Day heat • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/13/twitter_datacenter_labor_heat/

Tech giants such as Google and Meta own multiple data centers so that they can maintain their services in the event of a data center failure. Twitter, too, has data centers in Sacramento , Atlanta , Portland, and elsewhere to handle massive amounts of traffic every second.

Cooling systems are very important in data centers because a large number of servers generate heat during operation. Therefore, each technology company is working on various attempts, such as building in the Arctic Circle, submerging the entire data center in the Scottish seabed, submerging the entire server in a special liquid that boils at low temperature.

Microsoft's data center that cools the server by submerging it in a boiling liquid - GIGAZINE

According to a 2020 survey report by the IT consulting company Uptime Institute , about 40% of the energy consumed in data centers is used for cooling systems. In addition, if the outside temperature rises by 2°C above normal, the effect of air cooling and evaporative cooling systems will be almost lost, and depending on the situation, economic efficiency may be impaired.

According to an internal document obtained by CNN, Twitter's vice president of engineering Carrie Fernandez told internal engineers, 'On September 5th, Twitter's data center region in Sacramento was wiped out due to extreme weather. This unprecedented event resulted in a complete shutdown of the physical facilities at our data center in Sacramento.'

Fernandez also said, 'Twitter is in a non-redundant state due to the Sacramento data center outage.' Furthermore, at the time of the incident, the data centers in Atlanta and Portland were in operation, but if a problem occurs in either of these two data centers, Twitter itself may not be available. Fernandez warns.

``This issue highlights several vulnerabilities in Twitter's most basic system,'' CNN said. Twitter whistleblower Peter Zatko also testified, ``In the event of a temporary overlapping data center outage, it is highly likely that Twitter's services will be offline for weeks, months, or forever.'' That's what I'm talking about.

A Twitter spokesperson told CNN, ``(At the time of writing) there has been no disruption affecting the availability of Twitter.Our team has the tools and resources necessary to disseminate updated information. , and we will continue to work to provide a seamless Twitter experience.'