Twitter's Servers Reportedly Went Down During Extreme Heat Wave

Extreme weather caused the loss of the SMF data center region. According to CNN, Carrie Fernandez, the social media company's vice president of engineering, wrote in an internal message on Friday that the event resulted in the total shut down of physical equipment.

The server center outage didn't affect site users, instead it made them more vulnerable by taking their back-up data offline. Tech companies are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. When they are located in places like California's Central Valley, it's difficult to maintain their temperatures.

Tech giants have had similar issues recently. The United Kingdom experienced a heat wave earlier this year. Large scale mining operations in Texas had to reduce operations in July due to the heat.

The hottest week in West history was last week. It brought triple-digit temperatures to most of the state. The intense weather taxed the electric grid, and the state only narrowly avoided power cuts.

The electricity kept on, but the server didn't. The staff memo states that the outage put the service in a state of non-redundantness.

Atlanta, Georgia and Portland, Oregon are among the locations where the company has data centers. Data loss and total site outages are avoided by those centers. If one of the remaining data centers is lost, we will not be able to serve traffic to all of the users.

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko referred to the vulnerability and insufficient data center redundantness of the system in his complaint. There is a CNN story.

“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,” according to Zatko’s whistleblower disclosure. (Twitter has criticized Zatko and broadly defended itself against the allegations, saying the disclosure paints a “false narrative” of the company.)

There have been five days of server disruptions since the staff memo was sent on Friday. It is not known if the data center has been brought back online or if it is still offline.

Gizmodo asked about their data centers, but they did not reply. There have been no disruptions to the ability for people to access and use the service. Our teams remain equipped with the tools and resources they need to ship updates, and will continue working to provide a seamlessTwitter experience.