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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> Not only has the site stayed up

For some regions and values of "up". Let's not forget the temporary extreme rate limits, the day outage in Australia, the 2fa failures in multiple regions, the week of stuck/repeating timelines, the "something went wrong" pages, and a few smaller issues.

> Have you run your numbers?

Yes, finally. This has nothing to do with cloud, you may have a chance for some infra savings, moving whichever way makes sense for you. Run the numbers periodically. "#CloudExit" is dumb.

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Although most of Musk's cost savings have been as surgically-precise as Leatherface with DTs, Twitter did ink a very bad fixed-cost contract with GCP that left them with a lot of unused cloud capacity that was being overpaid for. Shutting down a data center likely left them with a lot of capitalized equipment that they could move GCP-hosted data processing to, and Musk isn't shy about exiting contracts, regardless of what the termination clauses might say.

In other words, a lot of these savings probably don't come from actual technical efficiencies, just getting out of a bad contracting situation and making use of a lot of already-acquired hardware.

(It's also likely that X/itter isn't in a position to make use of the kind of reporting and analytics infrastructure Twitter demanded, so they likely aren't losing much, business process-wise, in shutting that down.)

How much of the savings has also been a result of users leaving the platform?

This is a bit pessimistic, the X, formerly twitter, team deserves kudos for such a huge efficiency improvement with a quarter of the previous staffing.

I'm not disputing the efficiency improvements, and it's not pessimistic. It's what happened. There's a few people recently commenting how there were no issues post takeover and how Elon made Twitter profitable and... no, neither of those is true.

How does this relate to the prior comment? Why does some random person elsewhere opining on whether 'there were no issues post takeover' or 'Elon made Twitter profitable' matter ?

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