How can a company such as Twitter survive even after such a huge percentage of its workforce has been fired?
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Twitter is not really surviving right now. The thing about large and complex websites is that they take a lot of work to keep running reliably. And they take a lot of work to adhere to whatever laws in every country in the world that they operate in. Twitter is facing problems on all of these fronts, they just haven’t completely destroyed the company… Yet.
1. Site reliability went down the toilet. Twitter has had more outages in just one or two months under Musk than they have had in any given year in their recent history. The staff cannot keep up with the work and a lot of knowledge of how the systems work are no longer at the company.
2. Security is a huge question mark now. Musk fired many of the people responsible for security and everyone else is swamped just trying to keep the ship afloat. In any large web site, this is a huge red flag and means it’s practically inevitable for them to see a major security incident soon. Even worse is that these teams are responsible for actually detecting a breach. Which means it’s entirely possible that they’ve already been breached and no one knows. The security guard that’s supposed to be on the lookout basically got publicly clubbed over the head by the building’s owner.
3. Musk basically fired the people responsible for managing all the business relationships with their suppliers. These are companies that Twitter may have purchased software from to keep things working. Or the people that own the buildings they rent. Or the datacenters they work with. There have been a number of stories where the contracts with these entities have been violated through non-payment or unilateral ending of contracts (Contracts usually include a penalty for doing this). This leaves Twitter extremely vulnerable to lawsuits that they are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
4. A number of countries, particularly in the EU, are citing Twitter for breach of past agreements and currently being in breach of a number of regulations. This is a very bad sign for Twitter since it seems like the reason they’re in breach is because Musk fired the people responsible for keeping Twitter compliant. This means that they are now open to law suits or simply getting forced to stop operating in some of these countries until they are brought back into compliance.
I can go on. But simply put, what’s happening to Twitter now is basically unprecedented in the business world, not just the tech world. Yes, Twitter had more employees than what they needed to just keep things running because tech companies maintain staff to do new development. But what Musk did was not a well-informed layoff. He was literally the bull in the china shop that essentially arbitrarily fired people. People vital for the ongoing operation of the business itself, not just the site. The cost to Twitter, and Musk, is going to be much higher than whatever he saved by firing so many people. The only reason we haven’t seen a full collapse yet is because it takes time for things like lawsuits to work their way through the system. Or for hackers to get into the numerous holes that have been opened in the last few months.
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