Internet Outages Could Spread as Temperatures Rise. Here’s What Big Tech Is Doing – By David Lumb (CNET) / Nov 17, 2022
Data centers run our personal and professional lives, so it’s crucial that they keep working in a future of climate change.
This story is part of Choosing Earth, a series that chronicles the impact of climate change and explores what’s being done about the problem.
Early in September, when temperatures spiked to 116 degrees Fahrenheit and broke a 100-year record in Sacramento, California, the government told people to stay indoors as much as possible and to stay cool. That’s when people turning to Twitter to vent their grievances, but it turns out that their social media access could have melted down along with everything else.
The extreme heat led to a shutdown of Twitter’s entire data center region, CNN reported. While users on Twitter joked that it was just a dry heat and that a forced break from the social media site would do everyone good, the event was serious. As an internal memo from the company’s vice president of engineering, Carrie Fernandez, put it, if other data centers in Atlanta or Portland went down, “we may not be able to serve traffic to all Twitter’s users.”
The company declined to discuss specifics about the meltdown, but did say in October that there had been no disruptions impacting people’s ability to access and use Twitter. “Our teams remain equipped with the tools and resources they need to ship updates and will continue working to provide a seamless Twitter experience,” a spokesperson said at the time.
