Extreme California Heat Knocks Key Twitter Data Center Offline

Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers, and a company executive warned in an internal memo obtained by CNN that another outage elsewhere could result in the service going dark for some of its users. CNN reports: "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 an internal message to Twitter engineers on Friday. Major tech companies usually have multiple data centers, in part to ensure their service can stay online if one center fails; this is known as redundancy. As a result of the outage in Sacramento, Twitter is in a "non-redundant state," according to Fernandez's Friday memo. She explained that Twitter's data centers in Atlanta and Portland are still operational but warned, "If we lose one of those remaining datacenters, we may not be able to serve traffic to all Twitter's users." The memo goes on to prohibit non-critical updates to Twitter's product until the company can fully restore its Sacramento data center services. "All production changes, including deployments and releases to mobile platforms, are blocked with the exception of those changes required to address service continuity or other urgent operational needs," Fernandez wrote. In a statement about the Sacramento outage, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN, "There have been no disruptions impacting the ability for people to access and use Twitter at this time. Our teams remain equipped with the tools and resources they need to ship updates and will continue working to provide a seamless Twitter experience."

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