[vineyardmike]

Maintain servers not maintain services. Twitter likely had thousands of services doing thousands of different things. At their scale yes you need to keep thousands of people on payroll at least to turn off all the “fluff”.

Even if you can refactor and simply their work to half the workload, you can’t do that within a week. Even the boring organizational stuff is crazy at this scale. They for sure slashed whole teams at once. Who turned off those services? Or if they’re meant to be running, who owns them, organizationally? Where is the code living, what repo, what part of the code base, when something goes wrong, what metrics are being watched? Overnight teams had to become responsible for twice the code/services, potentially stuff they have never seen before. Bloated or not, that’s not easy.