[fcantournet]

Twitter ran ALL its infra for $1.7B in 2021. It made $5B in revenue that years, and was profitable with gross profit margin of 20+%. Your calculations are full of shit. And trying to fire 50% of the workforce and have the rest leave because the ship is sinking still doesn't make sense. To top it off, if your major problem is infra cost you don't fire engineers, you task engineers to reduce infra costs.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

That's $4M per day - or the way cloud products are priced per hour - ~$190k per hour.

W/o bulk discounts, ~$0.4 gets you 32GB of memory and 16 vCPU on AWS.

So this is only 400k blades. ~20 blades per rack. ~20k racks.

That's like 1 large data center in US, EU, Asia, & South America. Sure, Twitter should be getting a lot more for that because they have a larger scale and AWS has like >50% margins or whatever.

But before anyone says this is out of control for a company the size of Twitter, it's really not.

[ndriscoll]

That would absolutely be out of control. Assuming 24 core machines (which I would think is an underestimate), that'd be 10M cores, or ~1 core per 15-30 DAU. That seems like it's 3-4 orders of magnitude more than necessary.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

1 of your orders of magnitude is you're forgetting that 50-75% of traffic is signed-out, and that 30-50% of resources go to logging & analysis vs the core product.

Another order of magnitude is you're forgetting the cost of 3x storage & buffer for 99.99% uptime.

Another order of magnitude is that data transfer is REALLY expensive. They're not paying just for compute & storage.

[ndriscoll]

3x2x3 = 18x, which is still only ~1 order of magnitude (and I had actually already doubled the number of DAU I thought they had for that 30 number, but apparently it's more like 250M now, not 150M. I don't know whether that includes logged out users). I'm not sure how the data transfer or storage are relevant to how many blade servers are reasonable. My point was just that 400k blade servers would be insane. 400 seems like it'd be excessive, including triple redundancy.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

If you're Netflix - it costs a non-trivial amount of money to send video compared to the server that runs it.

If you're Twitter, this is also true to a lesser extent.

Netflix & Twitter have more server expenses than just querying databases.

[ndriscoll]

Right, they have other expenses. I was commenting only on the "only 400k blades" part. That's a staggering amount of computing power. I'm sure their analytics and advertising stuff requires a lot of compute, but the core functionality from the user perspective should doable on something closer to 4 dozen.

[andsoitis]

> Twitter ran ALL its infra for $1.7B in 2021. It made $5B in revenue that years, and was profitable with gross profit margin of 20+%.

I don’t know that it makes sense to say a company is profitable when they make a net loss, regardless of gross profit. In 2021 Twitter made a net loss of over $220 million.

[evanelias]

In 2021, Twitter settled a shareholder lawsuit for $800 million. That's a one-time expense, not an ongoing cost each year.

[andsoitis]

Twitter also made a net loss in 2020 to the tune of over $1 billion.

They only managed to report net income in 2018 and 2019.

So looking at the overall picture I still argue that saying Twitter is a profitable business to be very very optimistic and not really true.

[evanelias]

Seems less cut and dry to me:

* Profitable in 2018

* Profitable in 2019

* Would have been profitable in 2021, if not for the shareholder lawsuit

* Profitable in H1 2022, despite having an operating loss, due to making a $655m profit on the sale of MoPub

I'm not saying this is a great business. But some folks are making it sound like Twitter was about to collapse and go broke on its own, which is ridiculous. They still had $2.7B cash + $3.4B short-term investments on hand at the end of Q2!

[zimpenfish]

> In 2021 Twitter made a net loss of over $220 million.

Due to a legal settlement payout of $800M. Without that one-off, they'd have been $580M in profit.