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Bill Radke: The social networking site Twitter is up to 125 million users now, and 300,000 new tweeters sign up every day. All that traffic is stressing the company’s data system so the site freezes up,
a lot. Reporter April Dembosky tells us how Twitter’s responding.

April Dembosky: Some Twitter users have become all too familiar with the fail whale. That’s the pleasant cartoon image that translates to “your tweet is going nowhere.” San Francisco business consultant Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein gets it at the worst times. Like when she’s launching a new product.

Elizabeth Potts-Weinstein: We’re like we wish they would let us pay for some things so we could have more reliable service. I understand it’s free so we can only expect so much, but we would pay for it, but they won’t let us.

Right now another company stores and manages Twitters’ servers. But Twitter will open its own data center near Salt Lake City this fall.

MATT GRAVES: It’s a little bit like building your own house versus moving into an apartment.

That’s Twitter spokesman Matt Graves. He says the custom data center will give the company more capacity and more control.

GRAVES: This is the first of several data centers that we’re going to be opening.

Twitter is the latest Bay Area company to build a data center in Utah. EBay and Oracle are both investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the state.

In San Francisco, I’m April Dembosky for Marketplace.