If this is true - who knows - then it reflects rather badly on the people who were fired - as they didn't implement safeguard for a 'run over by a bus' scenario when they were in charge.
It's normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose some people. It's... less normal to plan for scenarios where you abruptly lose basically everybody; in most cases where that happens the company is basically dead anyway, so they're arguably not worth planning for.
Say you're planning, well, _anything_, and someone says "but in five years, a weird billionaire might buy the company and mismanage it to such an extent that your contingency plans don't work". There's a good argument that the proper response is that (a) that is largely the weird billionaire's problem and (b) that it is impossible to defend against an arbitrarily incompetent speculative future weird billionaire.
If someone takes a hammer to an electricity distribution board and electrocutes themselves, the normal response is not "well, that's the electrician's fault; they should have thought of that".
If true, this would "reflect rather badly" on exactly one person. But, y'know, it'll need to join a rather long queue of poorly reflecting things.
Not to forget the "90% get fired my an egotistical maniac who expressed his distain by quite publicly calling them lazy useless pieces of shit" scenario. That scenario is also seldom considered.
There's also possibility of: "If this person hadn't been fired, they could use some other form of credentials within twitter's internal systems plus a passphrase they have memorized to login to the private-key-repository system where the credentials for the root CA are stored and retrieve them. But as they were fired abruptly they are not inclined to help Musk. And nobody has asked them".
Sure, but you do abrupt firings of whole teams only if you don't need what these teams do.
It is quite reasonable if a company's response plan for scenario "what if we intentionally shoot ourselves in the head" is "don't do that, why would we do that?".
Abrupt firings of everyone with critical access, primaries and backups, is not, because its suicide. (Also why critical access roles are vetted carefully, because you want to make sure there is a lower-than-normal chance you will need to fire any of them, since that’s how you minimize the chance of a situation where you’d want to fire enough of them to cause a critical situation.)
If you do need decide there’s a problem that requires you to fire those people, you find every way possible to delay firing some of them while you expand the set of people with that access (which may be only momentary, by compelling them to hand over credentials as part of the exit process, if you have confidence that you can do that successfully.)
It reflects rather badly on you that you're talking mad shit without knowing their circumstances. What's the bus factor on your systems? Can they handle literally every person being fired overnight?
I've worked at companies where we've had policies about how much of the company can travel together (ie, how many people can be on the same plane). If your entire team is fired then the company is the problem, not the team.
There’s “someone got run over by a bus outside of our control” and “The people in charge direct a bus to run over everyone covering a key function”. You don’t really plan for the latter scenario when you are in charge, instead, you just don’t direct a bus to do that. If your successor decides to do that, that’s…on them.
To add on, people forget that Twitter was never really FAANG. It not only wasn't profitable but had no monetization plan for years. I'm sure it paid off for all the investors who got Elon's money but even as a Facebook competitor they don't have Facebook money.
It was profitable in 2019 and 2020, and could have been in 2022 (the first semester was huge, probably because of all the stuff happening all over the world).
All fine and good. Until the new owner just fires everyone over night anyway. At which point, I guess, it is not the previous ops team's problem anymore.
Say you're planning, well, _anything_, and someone says "but in five years, a weird billionaire might buy the company and mismanage it to such an extent that your contingency plans don't work". There's a good argument that the proper response is that (a) that is largely the weird billionaire's problem and (b) that it is impossible to defend against an arbitrarily incompetent speculative future weird billionaire.
If someone takes a hammer to an electricity distribution board and electrocutes themselves, the normal response is not "well, that's the electrician's fault; they should have thought of that".
If true, this would "reflect rather badly" on exactly one person. But, y'know, it'll need to join a rather long queue of poorly reflecting things.