The Seattle Times has reprinted an article from the NYT on more cuts to Twitter facilities and offices.
On Christmas Eve staff were sent to the Sacramento, CA data center, one of Twitter’s 3 main computing storage centers, to disconnect (unspecified) servers. Later in the article it mentions shutting down the Sacramento data center — not clear what the current state is from the article. If Twitter has shut down one of three data storage centers, that’s a rather abrupt reduction in redundancy!
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Twitter employees were not authorized to discuss the subject, although the article says some employees were worried that shutdowns would cause problems (hmmm — like people having trouble with access and login, maybe?). It appears that saving money is now a critical goal and Musk doesn’t care who or what he tramples in the process.
Twitter has stopped paying rent on their Seattle office, leading them to face eviction, has stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, etc. (I like the part about employees having to bring their own toilet paper.) He’s laid off or fired nearly 75% of the companies employees since completing the purchase in October. With no communications department left, nobody was available for comment. If they’ve also gotten rid of most of sales staff, I suspect even advertisers who still WANT to place ads on Twitter will have problems (and I’ve seen other articles indicating that — yeah, there are problems getting hold of anyone at Twitter sales).
I’d expect ad sales revenue to really crater in the new year. We’ll get a chance to see how well the $8 blue check works (or bounces).
Further on, the article discusses orders to managers (the few remaining, I suppose) to go to “zero based budgeting” and delay paying vendors (even more?) while trying to negotiate lower prices. A specific mention was made of skipping payments to KPMG — which has been working with the FTC on “compliance issues”. This could get interesting if the FTC gets PO’d.
Cuts in New York and in the San Francisco HQ office are also mentioned, along with Twitter having to hire people to replace terminated employees — but they only get 90 minutes of training and orientation, compared to three days. If they are going into technical support, I foresee some glorious data center disaster articles coming out in El Reg (the Register) in coming weeks.
As a fitting end bit — Musk claimed he personally disconnected “one of the more sensitive server racks”. Later that evening: ”the system Twitter uses to triage reports of illegal and harmful content went offline briefly”. How CONVENIENT!
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