Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has been making drastic changes to the social network soon after he took office. He has fired dozens of Twitter employees in a massive downsizing sweep including executives and managers alike. He is also planning to make the blue tick verification a paid privilege and it seems that it will cost $8.
According to sources familiar with the matter, Musk has now directed the Twitter team to save up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure costs. The information reportedly comes from an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters. This raises concerns about Twitter’s functionality during high-traffic events like the U.S. midterm elections.
The Slack message reveals that Twitter is planning to save up to $1.5 million to $3 million in a day from the company’s servers and cloud services. This project is apparently titled “Deep Cuts Plan.”
An internal document reviewed by Reuters says that Twitter is currently losing about $3 million a day “with all spending and revenue considered,”. The social media giant has not responded to a request to comment so far.
Twitter is now exploring whether to cut down extra server space that is kept to ensure the website stays up and running during high-traffic events. This puts the website and app at risk of going down during critical events when users are rushing to the social network to consume and share information, the sources said.
“Musk is willing to introduce that risk to meet these goals”, one of the sources said. The second source described these cut-downs as “delusional”, adding that the servers can fail “in spectacular ways” once the traffic kicks up.
Twitter employees are now rushing to present a cost-saving plan before the November 7 deadline, according to the Slack message shared by the sources. Some employees have also been ordered to work every day of the week to meet the deadline.
