innovating is a meaningless term in ad tech companies. optimizing I think is a better word.

I agree, just keeping things running at that scale requiere people with some impressive skills

We'll see, my bet is that nothing catastrophic will happen as a result of layoffs and hiring freeze at Twitter.

Revenue-wise I think a fake checkmarked Nintendo being up with a photo of mario doing the middle finger for hours does a lot, and spells not great stuff. My understanding is that advertisers aren't even locking in contracts for next year or similar.

I bet advertisers LOVE this situation. They probably weren't excited about how centralized systems are, which robs them of some of their say and power in the ecosystem. This is an opportunity for them to show what control and influence they have and basically a warning to others not to toy with their demands.

Twitter has already been having reliability issues for weeks or more, that's not going to get better if you lay off a bunch of your ops and sweng personnel