Twitter’s data center knocked out by extreme heat in California
Facebook said on Tuesday its data center in Concord, California, had suffered “catastrophic heat damage” due to high winds, and said it was “actively investigating the cause” as temperatures in the Bay Area soared.
A Twitter representative told Reuters the company had experienced “unusual load management” issues at the facility that led to problems with cooling. The representative was not authorized to speak publicly about the cause of the problems.
Twitter has been under pressure in the last few days after its CEO Dick Costolo faced questions from Wall Street about an unrelated data breach, an ongoing investigation about the company’s handling of customer data and a controversy over users’ use of a micro-blogging service built into Twitter’s Android app.
Twitter users shared tweets that were being sent through the micro-blogging service.
A U.S. Senate report on Capitol Hill in 2010 showed that, during the financial crisis, the U.S. Congress did not adequately address the problems Twitter faced in its first three years of operation in late 2009.
“This is the second time in a year this has happened at the Twitter data center in Concord. The first time, heat related issues forced the facility to shut down,” tweeted the company’s Twitter team.
A spokesman for Twitter said on Thursday the company was investigating why the site was knocked out. He also said the company had made several improvements to Twitter service to combat and reduce the risk of “service disruption due to extreme heat.”
A Twitter spokesman would not elaborate on how many tweets were affected, but a Twitter team shared on Twitter that it identified 20,000 tweets that had been “delivered through Twitter’s own servers, not through the Twitter mobile application.”
“This is to account for any additional tweets that may have been affected, but it’s too early to tell how many,” the spokesman said.
Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo was briefed by the company’s chief security officer about the outage, a spokeswoman for the social media behemoth said on Thursday.
Twitter reported a $1 million quarterly loss on Tuesday as