alt Hacker NewsIt is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
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You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge.
December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi...
February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos...
March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286
Is it really that shocking to you? Twitter is a very narrow company compared to Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple. The system was already up and running, they probably kept the employees that built or knew the system deeply and fired the others. Apparently it had around 7,500 employees at its peak. To me that seems excessive for something like Twitter.
things tend not to break in new ways when you don't change them.
maybe theres some scaling limit where twitter will have difficulty running, but its a fairly straightforward piece of software?
on the other hand, it likely has a bunch of security holes from not updating dependencies and so on
Because it does not take 7500 employees to keep a website online. It never did and it still doesn't and Twitter is not special in this regard.
Why does everyone focus on this aspect? Why is this surprising? Do people think that 100% or even 20% of Twitter employees were SREs? Do you think that most large applications are kept alive by constant manual toil from SREs? (ok, ok some are - but still!)
What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.
Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.
The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.
Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.