Twitter as a non critical application can afford to malfunction for a couple of minutes or maybe hours even.
I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.
One of the orgs that Elon cut the hardest was the trust and safety and spam team. He had strong condemnation for their "suppression" of "free speech".
Maybe he had a point. Maybe he didn't. But what is clear is that spam and fraudulent traffic on Twitter has exploded in the past year, to the point where it's causing serious problems.
To be fair, this is entirely a result of having too many front end developers and needing to find busywork for them. So instead of the tweet data being sent by the server in HTML, you load megabytes of JS that (if the stars align and it doesn’t “go wrong”) will then request the tweet from the server and display it.
I don't experience many problems with Twitter, not visibly more than before the layoffs.
But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.
I understand why this is happening, but the current technical problems of twitter are way, way overstated. Twitter has always been very buggy. It is indeed correct that for the longest time every time you clicked a twitter link and it opened in your browser you had to refresh the window to see it. This was pre-Musk.
If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.
I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.