Issues in Ad-Technology overshadow strong Twitter user growth

Bugs in Twitter’s vertising techlogy dragged on revenue, overshowing a surprisingly strong quarter of user growth. issue caught Wall Street off guard Thursday and shares plunged 19%, among company’s largest single-day losses since going public six years ago. San Francisco company said it’s dressing those issues, but that y will likely weigh on its vertising business in near term. It lowered its outlook for  fourth-quarter and for year. 

Bugs in Twitter's techlogy

problems shifted attention of industry analysts away positive trends in us on Twitter, which would typically imply strong revenue growth ahe. number of people using Twitter daily in most recent quarter jumped 17% to 145 million compared with same period last year, and increased by 6 million from just previous quarter. That is 3 million more users than industry analysts h expected, according to a survey by FactSet. “se bugs affected our ability to target s and share data with measurement and partners,” said Ned Segal, chief financial officer. “We also discovered that certain personalization and data settings were t operating as expected. se issues were in our control and we will work to do better.” 

Net income was $37 million, or 5 cents per share. Removing n-recurring charges, per-share profit was 17 cents, 3 cents shy of Wall Street expectations, according to a survey of industry analysts by FactSet. It was a 65% drop from last year’s justed profit of $106 million. Revenue was $824 million, an increase of 9% over same period last year, but well short of Wall Street’s projections of $874 million. Citi analyst Hao Yan said fixing bugs in company’s platform will be a priority, but sees it as a drag on revenue at least in near term. 

Twitter started disclosing its daily user base earlier this year. se are users who log into site at least once a day and see vertisements on platform. Twitter says daily metric is replacing its monthly user count, which it will longer disclose. company said it has me progress on what it calls “health” of its platform. microblogging service, which has been criticized in past for t doing eugh to combat abusive comments and users, says it has been proactively identifying and removing such content. CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday that more than 50% of tweets removed for abusive content last quarter were taken down before y were reported. 

Twitter w projects fourth-quarter revenue of $940 million, lower end of its previous guidance range and short of $1.1 billion analysts were looking for. vertising revenue came to $702 million for quarter, an increase of 8% over third quarter last year. company said data licensing and or revenue totalled $121 million, an increase of 12% over 2018′s third quarter. (Except heline, thing has been altered from original Associated Press wire)