[mikeweiss]

For those who weren't aware: Verizon got a new CEO late last year and laid off 15% of the workforce (15,000 people). This included people working in network, IT and cyber security.

[JacoboJacobi]

Everyone is always so negative about these outages, but if we look at the details we see it was a win as long as they maintain 85% up time.

[mmooss]

15% seems like the magic number. It seems like many corporations layoff approximately that fraction of their workforce; it's hard to believe it's coincidence.

[schmuckonwheels]

Is there a substantive connection?

Like all the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.

It's also ironic in the sense it implies the indignant people were so bad at their jobs they designed and built a system so fragile it would collapse without constant intervention from thousands of individuals.

You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?

[happytoexplain]

This is unrealistic and seems to be biased by some kind of broad un-focused hostility. Yes, maybe they were overstaffed. But it's reasonable to suspect that leadership overcut, given the current climate and the number being 15,000. Your characterization of Twitter predictions relies on cherry-picking and ignores the actual impacts, and there's no evidence that the system goes down without "constant" intervention from "thousands". Your tone also implies that large, complex systems, even if designed well, don't normally require a lot of maintenance from many people.

[SoftTalker]

Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting to hit a quarterly target.

[Lord_Zero]

There were issues and outages for weeks after the layoffs though. Many people also believe its overrun with far more bots than when it had more robust content moderation tools and teams.

Also things break. Vulnerabilities come along that need to be carefully patched and deployed. Tools and packages get depreciated. Updates can be done to save compute, and money. Things don't just hum along with zero intervention by no one for years and years.

[NBJack]

Real-time multi-directional communications over massive geographic areas with tens of thousands of physical cell sites connected to ~140M devices vs... public text messages with media.

I realize your point, but its fair to say maintaining a nationwide physical wireless infrastructure may not be the same as hosting tweets, particularly when outages strike.

[kshacker]

Slight sarcasm ahead—fair warning.

When Twitter did, its CEO may have slept at the office for weeks to make sure problems were resolved.

On the other hand, the Verizon CEO may be shopping for a new boat

[mmooss]

> the doom and gloom after the Twitter layoffs predicting the site would implode and go permanently offline "within a month" which...never happened.

Many think Twitter has imploded, though it's online.

> You do realize it's possible for an organization to be overstaffed?

It's possible to be understaffed or appropriately staffed. Anything is possible!

[Nextgrid]

If you’ve got 100k people to run something that should run essentially on autopilot, you’ve got much deeper problems where merely laying off selected chunks of people will no longer help. The whole company is rotten and the only way is to start from scratch and not make the mistakes that led you to accumulate 100k people.

I can't even begin to imagine what those 100k people actually do. For starters, none of the telcos actually develop their own equipment - they buy pre-made from vendors like Ericsson. Often that includes ongoing maintenance too. The only "engineering" is building the back-office and customer-facing UIs, and even that is often outsourced (as a rule of thumb, if something can be outsourced, telcos will do it: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/).

Customer service might be part of that number (assuming that too isn't outsourced), but even then 100k feels extreme.

10k is ok although leaning on the more bloated side. But 100k?

[IncandescentGas]

Telco infra runs on autopilot?

[toss1]

Obviously, you know exactly how to run a major telecomm operation ten times as efficiently as the dominant operator in the most prosperous nation on earth — you are wasting your skills and should absolutely be given funding to disrupt them and make Billions!! What is holding you back from joining the Oligarchs?

[Hikikomori]

These magic devices just teleport out to the location, connect and configure themselves?

[mschuster91]

The problem with being a nationwide ISP - and Verizon runs mobile phones, fiber and all kinds of other stuff - is that you need lots of hands across the country. A lot of stuff can be done remotely and with automation, but often enough you still need actual physical hands on site, and you can't just say "eh, we'll come around tomorrow, we can't make it there faster".