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.”
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.
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.