Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B

Good luck with that.

Also, interestingly that’s exactly the amount Twitter will need to service the debt they’re saddled with due to the acquisition. Now he just needs to make up the pesky $500M operating deficit and his shiny new toy will break even.

There's definitely ways for them to save money. I heard a rumour some time ago that after Twitter switched to the free/open source Graal JVM JIT compiler it saved them quite a bit of CPU time. Then they did the calculations to see how much they'd save if they licensed Graal Enterprise which is better at optimizing, and it was supposedly well worth it even when taking the licensing costs into account. No lockin, because it's just compiler optimizations.

But, they said no. They decided they'd rather spend more on hardware and pay interns to work on the open source version than pay for a better compiler, because, open source.

That seemed like a very clear and objective example of where they preferred to spend money on increased headcount vs what was maybe the most cost-efficient business decision. I wonder how many more examples like there are lurking in the corners.

Aww, I remember the Fail Whale. I hope they still have it somewhere, would be a nice reminder of the old days to see it again.

Almost exactly the debt service interest payments, what a surprise.

Log less. Run on a 20 node cluster.

RIP cloud services. Google and Amazon overpriced their offerings and companies are finally moving away.

There’s probably a good amount of fat that can be cut. “Excess server capacity” implies to me that they don’t have an effective auto scaling strategy