Source: Twitter laid off ~40 ad optimization data scientists and engineers, as the company targets areas that leadership considers to be failing or unimportant
Erin Woo / The Information :
Context & Ripple Effects
This cut lands mid-arc in Twitter's dismantling of its ad organization. After the November mass layoffs gutted key teams and contractor cuts hit content moderation, marketing, and real estate, the company is now going after the specialists who tune ad delivery itself — about 40 data scientists and engineers on the optimization side.
The timing matters because the ad business was already bleeding: days later, a manager told employees daily revenue was running 40% below a year earlier with more than 500 top advertisers paused. Cutting the people who optimize ad performance while demand collapses signals leadership would rather prune what it considers failing than staff a recovery.
First-order effects
- Twitter's remaining ad team loses the optimization capacity that tunes campaign delivery, precisely as it must win back the hundreds of paused top advertisers named in internal revenue updates.
Second-order effects
- With fewer optimization engineers, Twitter leans harder on leadership-directed rebuilds — the same dynamic behind the later push to make ad targeting work like Google search ads within a week, which triggered another round of sales and engineering layoffs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter's ad platform shifts from empirically tuned systems maintained by specialist teams to products shaped by executive judgment and compressed timelines — a structure where each performance shortfall justifies further cuts rather than more investment.
The trend: Twitter under Elon Musk is restructuring its ad business through successive targeted layoffs, trading institutional measurement expertise for speed and leadership-driven priorities.