As a native speaker that reads as: "Microsoft blames outage on small [number of] staff". I'm not sure of the technical terms, but "staff" can both be the tota

As a native speaker that reads as: "Microsoft blames outage on small [number of] staff". I'm not sure of the technical terms, but "staff" can both be the total mass of employees, and the individual employees. "Small staff" means a small number of employees in the same way "small army" means a small number of soldiers. Something, something countable vs uncountable nouns?