$ ~/back-of-the-envelope
[003] storage

How much storage does Twitter need per month for tweet content?

hard storagecapacity-planningtwittersocial-media

The scenario

You’re doing capacity planning for a Twitter-scale social platform. The service has 100 million active users and receives 500 million tweets per day.

A tweet record includes: tweet ID (8 bytes), user ID (32 bytes), text (up to 140 bytes), and — critically — an average of ~10 KB of attached media per tweet.

How much new storage does the platform need to provision per month?

Adapted from: donnemartin/system-design-primer — Design Twitter TimelineCC BY 4.0

$answer:TB/month