Twitter posted its fourth quarter results for 2014 earlier today. The
company reported it had 288 million monthly users at the end of Q4, a
jump of 20 percent from the same quarter last year.
But it was below market expectations, as a closer look at the numbers
revealed that Twitter added just 4 million users during the Q4.
They said that an “unforeseen bug in iOS 8″ resulted in the
company losing 4 million new users. Chief Executive Officer Dick
Costolo said that the company “moved on multiple fronts to minimize its
impact but it wasn’t a one-size-fits-all fix” on a conference
call. He did not provide any more details about the bug.
“there was an intermittent Twitter-specific bug in early iOS 8 where saved Twitter accounts had to be re-authorized to work, which basically meant that users had to remove the Twitter account and re-add it.”
The fact that the company lost 4 million users, suggests that it took quite sometime for the bug to be fixed.It is probably the first time a publicly listed company has blamed Apple (as a partner) directly for a drop in numbers. Apple hasn’t commented on Twitter’s remark.
