Extreme California heat knocks key Twitter data center offline

Twitter (TWTR), like all major social media platforms, relies on data centers, which are essentially huge warehouses full of computers, including servers and storage systems. Controlling the temperature in those centers is critical to ensuring the computers don’t overheat and malfunction. To save on cooling costs, some tech companies have increasingly looked to place their data centers in colder climates; Google, for example, opened a data center in Finland in 2011, and Meta has had one center in northern Sweden since 2013.

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.

The restrictions highlight the apparent fragility of some of Twitter’s most fundamental systems, a problem Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security who turned whistleblower, had raised in a disclosure sent to lawmakers and government agencies in July.

In his whistleblower disclosure, first reported by CNN and The Washington Post, Zatko warned that Twitter had “insufficient data center redundancy” that raised the risk of a brief service outage or even the prospect of Twitter going offline for good.

“Even a temporary but overlapping outage of a small number of datacenters 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.)

News of the data center outage comes a day before Zatko is due to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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.”

Data centers need “reliable water, power, humidity controls and refrigeration to live,” said retired brigadier general Greg Touhill, who served as the US government’s chief information security officer in 2016 and 2017.

“You want redundancy, not duplication, of your data locations to enhance your cyber resilience so you can take a punch from a natural disaster [or other event] that can take down a single piece of equipment or data center,” Touhill, who now heads the CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, told CNN.