Twitter on Mars: Musk Wants to Shut NoCal Data Center

Elon Musk’s haphazard downsizing of Twitter—which has drastically shrunk the company’s workforce, user base and portfolio of advertising clients—has now impacted the sizeable data processing footprint of the social media platform.

According to a report in the NY Times, Musk wants to shut Twitter’s hyperscale data center in California, one of three large data processing facilities used by the company. Twitter leases its data center space from services providers.

The closure of the SMF1 data center in Sacramento—a facility that was involved in a major Twitter service disruption when it overheated during California’s record heat wave in September—will be accompanied by a reduction in the cloud services Twitter uses, as part of a $1B reduction in infrastructure spending that Musk has ordered.

Since he acquired Twitter for $44B—or, more accurately, was forced to go through the deal as a court fight loomed—Musk has been on a cost-cutting binge involving mass layoffs and bizarre challenges to staffers to resign if they won’t commit to be “hardcore” like Elon—who apparently sleeps less than Thomas Edison (who slept on his desk for four hours every night, according to the tour guides at his lab in West Orange, NJ).

Twitter is a large client of cloud services Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, but Musk—who took his first steps on the way to becoming the world’s richest man by developing PayPal—apparently has some ideas for reducing cloud usage without collapsing the Twitter platform, which his other initiatives (i.e. chasing out the company’s best engineers) may succeed in doing.

According to a report in The Information, Musk wants to tweak the company’s cloud service by deleting certain types of data stored in the cloud after 21 days and by reducing how many advertisements are served to occasional Twitter users, among other adjustments, to reduce the chatter platform’s cloud usage.

No word on whether Elon might stop tweeting to pare down the cloud usage by Twitter, but we suspect a couple of gigawatts might be saved if he goes that route.

According to the report in The Information, Musk may not have to actually shutter the Sacramento data center campus to take it offline: the “Command Center” team at Twitter responsible for preventing outages has been chopped to the core, and the core—meaning Twitter’s core services IT architecture team—has been reduced from more than 100 technicians to four.

In the wake of Musk’s torrent of no-notice layoffs, the on-site data center at Twitter’s New York offices overheated last week, cutting off the building’s internet service—and there were no IT guys left to repair it.

New entry for Elon’s Suggestion Box: change the name of the company to Twitter on Mars.