Twitter Company Logo (Photo : Twitter)
Twitter's quarterly results were unexpectedly presented before the opportune time by someone on Twitter itself. Apparently, the information about Twitter's earnings was sourced from the site of the company by an account calling itself Selerity, which tweeted it was "No hack, no leak."
The stock plummeted 20% even while users grew as forecasted by the Wall Street Journal and earnings were above the level of expectations.
Sales pegged a $436 million -- much below the forecast of $457 million, according to CNN Money.
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and CFO Anthony Noto, the company is still having trouble keeping users logged in, acquiring new users, and offering advertisers reasons to invest more.
Responsibility for the leak later shifted towards Nasdaq, which manages Twitter's investor relations page.
Twitter's revenue went up 74% to US$436mln in the first quarter, which had overdone popular estimates. However, compared with the first three months in 2014, the company incurred a loss of $162mln.
"Revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products," Costolo said, according to Proactive Investors UK.
Twitter re-described its full-year forecast range for revenue to the range of $2.17bn -$2.27bn, down from its earlier range of US$2.3bn -US$2.35bn.
The micro-blogging company had 302mln average monthly users in the first quarter, which is 18% more from 288mln it had a year ago, but 20% less than what it had in the preceding quarter.
Twitter is ready to fight back the odds. It has invented features such as "while you were away" and algorithmic timelines to increase the engagement levels of the users, according to Costolo.
"We're seeing most exciting results here," Costolo said.
