Twitter lost a data center to extreme heat

On Monday, September 5, the platform “experienced the loss of its Sacramento data center (SMF) due to extreme weather,” said an internal message to Twitter engineers sent on Friday, according to the article published by .

September 5 marked the beginning of the most intense leg of one of the largest heat waves in Northern California history: Downtown Sacramento reached 113 degrees, followed by a high of 116 degrees that turned last Tuesday on the hottest day in the city’s history.

Data centers are warehouse-like sites with large volumes of computers, servers, and other equipment, much of which must be temperature-controlled or risk overheating.

The internal memo, sent by VP of Engineering Carrie Fernandez, says the Sacramento outage left Twitter in a “non-redundant” state.

This means that if one of the other two sites, located in Portland and Atlanta, experiences an outage, the platform may “not be able to deliver traffic to all Twitter users.”

In a statement to , Twitter said “there have been no outages impacting people’s ability to access and use the social network at this time.”

Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former chief of security, complained last month to several federal government agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, about Twitter’s “insufficient data center redundancy,” reported.

Zatko’s complaint noted that in the period from 2020 to 2021, Twitter had data centers in Sacramento and Atlanta, with plans beginning in 2020 to add a new data center, according to a recent Washington Post report, which obtained a copy of the complaint.