Given the recent issues they've had with other portfolio companies, I wonder if the C suite moves were based on family ties that Softbank didn't like. Seems like a lot of upper management at Fair were related to each other.
What about requiring PTP sync or shutting down the node? I have no idea about the practical implications, just something I thought of. You can get a CDMA time server on ebay for a few hundred bucks that support PTP.
It takes engineers to run and utilize all that stuff. You don't need a back-end scaling team you're only throwing around XMPP in Erlang.
Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.
Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones.
Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.
Not trying to be snarky, but when have you ever seen a company do "surgical" layoffs? Anything across the board is not surgical by definition. This is just a plain, simple RIF to stem the losses. There's nothing surgical about it. Surgical would imply killing off specific teams and products. This is across the board.