Twitter’s data center knocked out by extreme heat in California and elsewhere
It began as a routine power outage, with Facebook’s data centers in San Francisco, Dublin, Ireland, and Ireland, respectively, in the UK’s capital and one of five cities in northern England hit by a “critical outage.”
“We’ve not observed any indication that data centers are any more vulnerable than other types of critical infrastructure,” Mark Sainsbury, senior security technologist for Facebook, told Ars. “However, we don’t have any information on the impact either on our customer’s services or on our data centers.”
The power outage occurred at 1:12pm Pacific Standard Time (12:12pm London, 1:12pm Paris, 12:12pm Auckland, or 1:12pm EST) on July 20.
The center in Ireland, located in Bray, County Wicklow, was the first to have power cut. But the data center in San Francisco was the first to suffer severe damage. Facebook confirmed to Ars that at 1:29pm, the data center in Dublin had suffered an “enormous load spike” and “failed all loads.”
“About 40 minutes later, we began to experience significant impact from the incident, and we experienced approximately a 3-minute power outage,” Facebook said in a statement. “With more than 60% of the facility completely unrepairable, we have begun assessing the damage and are working to restore the site as quickly as possible.”
Two other Facebook data center locations, in Cork City and Sligo, Ireland, were the first to be knocked offline.
We’ve made some adjustments to our power infrastructure after a very large power outage in San Francisco occurred today
The outage was part of an ongoing power outage across Europe and the U.K. that started with a “critical outage” early last week. A second blackout on Wednesday afternoon was the largest seen in Europe since 2007, according to the BBC.
The Facebook incident was the most severe outages experienced by other companies. Microsoft was forced to shut down all Xbox Live services, including the Xbox Live marketplace
