Instagram had 13 at acquisition, presumably content moderation was outsourced but they definitely had to deal with it and bots by that point.
>provide tooling for governments
What tooling do they provide for governments?
>provide tooling for governments
What tooling do they provide for governments?
This right here is why you can discount most replies on HN right off the bat. The "I can make software X in a day" posts are 99% bullshit because the posters making them have idea what business reality look like. If their program gained any popularity they'd be in a panic the first time the FBI dumped a warrant in their lap and their full stack developer is now spending a week with the lawyer trying to figure out how to untangle their data while the customers that paid for ads are yelling the metrics API went down 2 days ago.
No, they had 30M:
https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...
IG 13 employees at 30m users. Couldn't find # of servers.
FB had 10k servers in 2008 and 100m users, 850 employees.
I believe Doubleclick had ~500-1000 servers for ~10b daily impressions in mid-2000s.
Those numbers are all on circa 2010 hardware, so.. divide by a decade of performance doubling every 2 years (conservatively), or ~5x fewer servers in 2020.
The government takedown stuff, from personal experience, is tiny on the systems side; much more about moderators and expensive legal staffing.
These are very rough estimates, but I've heard 250k servers for Twitter.. that's much more on par with Goog/Amzn/Msft serving clouds at ~1m+ machines. That's a mystery to me.