Twitter Explosion Responsible for New NTT Data Center

NTT America is opening a new, 15,000-square-foot data center in California, and it’s all thanks to Twitter.

The microblogging site’s explosive growth made the decision to lease the new facility an easy one for NTT America, which, through a managed hosting agreement, provides Twitter with infrastructure services

Twitter, the media darling, grew more than 750 percent in 2008 and has continued to make strides toward social networking leader Facebook in 2009. It grew 131 percent in March alone.

A few months ago, NTT said Twitter traffic is devouring a lot of data center resources, so the decision to lease a new facility comes as no surprise.

NTT played a critical role in the Iran election crisis when it decided to push back an important network upgrade in order to keep Twitter up and running. The site was scheduled to go down for maintenance for several hours.