Twitter, beset by outages, will open new data center in Salt Lake City

Twitter is big. Twitter is getting bigger. And Twitter users tweet a lot – 50 million tweets a day, often at a velocity of 600 tweets per second.

That's some serious activity, and in recent months, Twitter has hit by wave after wave of outages and pesky bugs. Now Twitter has announced that it will move its technical operations to "a new, custom-built data center in the Salt Lake City area," in an effort to keep up with the site's skyrocketing traffic needs. The new data center is "built for high availability and redundancy in our network and systems infrastructure," Twitter reps announced.

"When you can't update your profile photo, send a Tweet, or even sign on to Twitter, it's frustrating," Twitter spokesman Matt Graves wrote on the official Twitter blog on Wednesday afternoon. "We know that, and we've had too many of these issues recently. [W]e are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform. It’s our number one priority."

The most recent Twitter outage hit on Monday. Many Twitter users reported being unable to sign in, update profiles or change background images. The outage last several hours. "[A] fault in the database that stores Twitter user records caused problems on both Twitter.com and our API," Twitter wrote in a message to users. "The short, non-technical explanation is that a mistake led to some problems that we were able to fix without losing any data."

Monday's mess comes on the heels of a major meltdown in May, when Twitter engineers reset the profiles of millions of users in an effort to halt the progress of a fast-moving virus.