The Fail Whale is the graphic that Twitter puts up when its servers can no longer cope with the ever-growing volume of messages — this year, on average, more than 300,000 people are signing up for new accounts each day.
The new data centre in Salt Lake City will be the microblogging service’s first custom facility. “Having dedicated data centers will give us more capacity to accommodate this growth in users and activity on Twitter,” says Jean-Paul Cozzatti, a Twitter engineer. ”Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs.”
Cozzatti adds that with its own centre, Twitter will be able to make adjustments more quickly, which should mean that if the whale does reappear it won’t be around for quite so long.
