Twitter is shutting down its data center in Sacramento, and will downsize its facility in Atlanta, Platformer's Zoë Schiffer reports. The decision was previously rumored in November.

The company operates three main facilities in the US, with its remaining site in Portland, Oregon, expected to take the increased load. It is not clear if Twitter has done an analysis of the migration and whether the remaining servers can handle the load - when the Sacramento data center collapsed in September it caused a system outage. The move is expected to happen as soon as early January.

Twitter also has cloud contracts with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, but new owner Elon Musk is believed to be trying to renegotiate the contracts and cut expenses.

At the same time, he said that he plans to release new services that will require more storage and compute, including long-form high resolution video.

Former Twitter employee Sasha Solomon, who was fired after tweeting "sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" about Musk's acquisition, responded to the data center closure report with: "Omfg like good luck when a failover needs to happen. So excited to see what 1-ish data center can do with all of Twitter's traffic."

Fellow former Twitter staffer Gerard Taylor added: "I'm just thinking about how many aurora files are hardcoded to only use SMF1. There's going to be at least one outage guaranteed."

Another ex-employee, Catherine Bonn, joked: "I mean, by the end of Q1 Twitter might have exponentially less traffic, so maybe it will work out fine?"

Since he acquired the company earlier this year in a deal he tried to get scrapped, Musk has aggressively sought to reduce costs.

Musk fired roughly half of the company's 7,500 staff soon after his acquisition. He then fired people that criticized him publicly, as well as searched through private company messages for critics to lay off.

Remaining staff were given a deadline over whether to stay, offering severance packages to those who left and promising "long hours at high intensity" and an "extremely hardcore" environment for those that remained.

More than a thousand quit, including many at the Twitter Command Center (tasked with preventing outages and tech failures during periods of high demand). The 'core services' computing architecture team went from more than 100 people to four.

In a recent Twitter Spaces discussion, Musk said that the drastic cuts were because the company faced a "negative cash flow situation of $3 billion per year," with $1-1.5bn going to servicing debt.

The high interest repayments were a result of his acquisition, which saddled the company with $12.5bn in debt.