Character-limited social network Twitter on Thursday announced a lower-than-expected number of monthly active users for its just-completed fourth quarter, a figure that the company blamed in part on problems in Apple's rollout of iOS 8.
Update: The issue was twofold, Costolo told BusinessInsider. 3 million active users were lost after Apple stopped auto-polling Twitter feeds for Safari's Shared Links feature, while a further 1 million were lost due to encryption changes in iOS 8 that caused trouble for some users attempting to log in.
To clarify from yesterday's call: there was no bug or issue with iOS 8. It is an issue on Twitter's side as users upgraded.
— TwitterIR (@TwitterIR) February 6, 2015
During Twitter's quarterly conference call, CEO Dick Costolo said that an "unforeseen bug in the release of iOS 8 as it related to Twitter" was a drag on user growth, according to Bloomberg. "We moved on multiple fronts to minimize its impact but it wasn't a one-size-fits-all fix," he added, without going into more detail.
Twitter CFO Anthony Noto later quantified the loss, saying that the bug cost Twitter some 4 million new users. Those users could have bumped Twitter's monthly active users — a closely-watched benchmark of growth for the company — Â from the 288 million that it reported to the 292 million that Wall Street expected, though the miss was softened by strong earnings growth and a new search deal with Google.
It is unclear to which bug Costolo was referring, thought it has since apparently been fixed. "We obviously have a great relationship with Apple," Costolo said later in the call.
42 Comments
Interesting take on it Twitter. Considering Apple is responsible for ALL THE REST OF YOUR USERS too.
How the **** does an iOS bug cause cause of the LOSS of 4 MILLION Twitter users? EVen if those users somehow had trouble signing up with iOS8, if they cared about the service they would have tried again some other way. Love how these companies use Apple as a scapegoat for all their woes.
Blaming Apple without backing up with evidence or details on the bug. GTFO.
it was as if the flaming yellow thing in the sky had gone forever, but then it arrived 12 hours later, we knew we were back on track again
Well he did say active users. It could prevent some sharing from going through, which if not alerted to, one may not know it isn't working