Twitter: Elon Musk wants to streamline server infrastructure

Elon Musk symbolically entered Twitter’s offices in San Francisco with a washbasin immediately after taking over as CEO. Now, barely ten days after the purchase of the short message service, he is following up this symbol with action. After all, the handling of the equally dazzling and controversial tech billionaire with the social network is reminiscent of a large-scale restructuring. Now the Tesla boss has set his personal goal for Twitter. So he wants to say goodbye to the 3 million US dollars loss, which the service probably makes every day.

Twitter needs to tighten its belt

With some 238 million active users in the second quarter of 2022, Twitter is arguably one of the most widely used social networks in the world. But to keep such a network alive, a correspondingly powerful infrastructure is also needed. It is precisely in this area that the freshly appointed new Twitter CEO Elon Musk would like to apply the red pencil. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, savings of around $1 billion are likely to be possible here. This refers to internal company chats of employees of the short message service. On top of that, the source says that Twitter probably makes a loss of 3 million US dollars every day.

This is now to be an end under the new management. It was already clear to the workforce before his actual takeover that Elon Musk would be driving a hard austerity course. He spoke in advance of laying off up to 75 percent of Twitter employees. The Tesla CEO made it clear right at the start that these were not just empty phrases by launching a comprehensive wave of layoffs. As part of his “deep cuts plan,” the tech billionaire now also wants to slim down the required hardware. Thus one would like to save by purposeful reduction of the server as well as Cloudinfrastruktur up to 3 million US dollar. What may sound reasonable in theory, but also has its downsides.

Server outages threaten

Twitter has not built this large infrastructure without reason. After all, this is to ensure the most reliable and constant operation of the service. Whoever saves at this point, must therefore sooner or later expect that there will be more frequent disruptions or even failures of the short message service. Especially when hashtags are running hot due to an incident of global significance, this represents a challenge for servers and the cloud. Suitable reserves are therefore all the more important to keep both website and app up and running. Whether Musk will really pull this off is therefore doubtful. However, it is almost to be wished for the staff. If the Tesla boss realizes that the server and cloud infrastructure do not offer any great savings potential, sooner or later even more employees will have to leave the company.