Musk orders Twitter to slash cloud and other tech infrastructure costs

Twitter employees have been tasked with finding $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings by new CEO and owner Elon Musk

An internal Slack message originally reported by Reuters (opens in new tab) saw workers at the social network told to save between $1.5 million and $3 million per day from cost-cutting in areas such as servers and cloud hosting services, as part of a basket of measures called the “Deep Cuts Plan.”

In addition, the Slack messages claimed Twitter is currently hemorrhaging about $3 million a day “with all spending and revenue considered”.

Who will the cuts impact?

Google Cloud, which is a big provider of cloud services to Twitter, is set to take some of the cuts if the sources are to be believed. 

In addition, employees could also now be placed under severe pressure to get results in a short period. 

“Teams across Twitter” are reportedly tasked with presenting a plan to achieve cost savings by a November 7 deadline according to the news organization’s sources.

It may be in their best interests to do a good job; it has been previously reported that Twitter plans to axe up to 3,700 workers under the new ownership. 

In addition, the sources claimed that some employees at the company have expressed cynicism about the feasibility of Musk’s plans. 

One source quoted by Reuters dubbed the idea “delusional” and suggested it could increase the risk of downtime during periods of high traffic such as US elections. 

Twitter may also need to deal with the potential for lower overall revenues.

Elon Musk took to Twitter (opens in new tab) to declare that his latest acquisition has seen has “had had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers”.

It’s not just Twitter that is spending big, perhaps too big, on cloud services. 

A recent report commissioned by Couchbase found that with a typical enterprise spending more than $33 million a year on cloud services, and spending 35% more than what’s necessary, many are losing more than $8.75 million that could be saved or spent elsewhere.