Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs leave whole teams gutted
www.theverge.com
“Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee.

Elon Musk has now purged roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted, including those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week, The Verge has learned.

The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams

:melon-musk: .

Given the sweeping nature of Musk’s layoffs and his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting, employees who remain at Twitter told The Verge that they expect the company to have a hard time maintaining critical infrastructure in the short term. “Shit is gonna start breaking,” said one current employee who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, while another called management’s layoff process “an absolute shit show.”

Update: Twitter is now also being sued by former employees for Elon Musk’s mass firing / The company is being sued in a class-action lawsuit for violation of the federal WARN Act

  • GenXen [any, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    his mandate to cut costs in areas like cloud hosting,

    This motherfucker is probably still chapped about Levchin rallying a mutiny to get him fired as CEO over his plan to replace PayPal's Unix architecture with Windows NT.

    "I have a radical idea. We're going to pull all our cloud infrastructure ....... on premises. Much cheaper!"

      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Elons going to try one twitter on one machine with a custom ISO of Windows Server 2008 he created using the horrific official Microsoft customisation tool.

    • riseuppikmin [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Please tell me you can link a story on this because I need the laugh

      • GenXen [any, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Here you go : The PayPal Mafia - Fortune Magazine - 2007

        Musk became CEO of the combined company and decided it was time for a technological overhaul. Specifically, he wanted to toss out Unix and put everything on a Microsoft (MSFT) platform. That may sound innocent enough to laypeople but not to Unix zealots like Levchin and his team. A holy war ensued. Musk lost. The board fired him and brought back Thiel while Musk was on a flight to Australia for his first vacation in years. “That’s the problem with vacations,” Musk deadpans. Musk still contends he didn’t deserve his fate, that his biggest flaw was being cut from different cloth.

    • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      At Twitter scale it might actually be cheaper to migrate back to data centers instead of paying AWS or whoever a premium for their servers. Of course, this is a stupidly expensive and painful process and requires legions of engineers and project managers to pull off, so :melon-musk: firing half the company and then trying to do it is just shooting himself in the dick.

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Twitter is definitely big enough that they should be using a colocation data center. It's possible AWS gave them a crazy sweet-heart deal though, since "good enough to run twitter" is good advertising for them.