Why does everyone focus on this aspect? Why is this surprising? Do people think that 100% or even 20% of Twitter employees were SREs? Do you think that most large applications are kept alive by constant manual toil from SREs? (ok, ok some are - but still!)

What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.

Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.

The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.

Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.