On Thursday, May 22, a fire broke out at a Hillsboro data center leased by Elon Musk’s micro-blogging platform, X, causing a data center outage that disrupted service for thousands of users across the US, mostly affecting app access.
The fire confined to a battery storage area triggered emergency protocols and led to evacuating the site. No one was injured, but the blaze triggered a chain reaction leading to extreme X performance degradation for users. Throughout the fire, various users began reporting X outages and connectivity problems, putting the platform’s infrastructure resilience into question.
Fire Causes Major X Outage
The Hillsboro data center incident involved an incident of a fire within a battery storage room in X’s rented facility. Digital Realty, the owner of the facility, confirmed the data center fires had been terminated and all of its staff were evacuated safely.
“When they arrived they found batteries inside a room inside what we understood to be a data center. The fire itself was contained to the battery set there and hadn’t spread anywhere else in that room,” Hillsboro Fire & Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich explained.
Shortly after the incident, reports of an X data center outage began emerging. Later in the afternoon, nearly 26,000 users were impacted by the site, with app users bearing the bulk of the disruption, 68% of them were impacted compared to 24% of desktop users.
Metro areas like New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Florida, and Atlanta were hit the worst with X performance problems. Meanwhile, many expressed their frustrations on the internet. “This is what happens when you fire too many people in the name of efficiency” said one Reddit user, while another blamed vulnerabilities in X’s system, claiming that Elon Musk was “too cheap to pay Operational Testing (OT),” a process that monitors system performance and can prevent outages.
X’s Infrastructure Stability
To note, this is not the first time X went down, the platform had also experienced an initial outage on March 10, caused by a suspected cyberattack, but no public evidence confirmed this.
The data center failure is another example of the hefty reliance of social media platforms on critical infrastructures, like data centers, and the fire? Well, it’s a threat to service stability, as exemplified by the latest Hillsboro data center event, which also questions X’s system vulnerabilities and how well the company can cope with technical problems.
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