[johannes1234321]

They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)

Also initially they had a lot of breakage.

[lesuorac]

Also they made an entire separate company X.ai to do Grok and some other stuff which certainly involved hiring people.

[websiteapi]

Indeed when you have fewer people you generally reduce scope