Twitter Lost 4 Million Monthly Active Users Because of an Apple iOS 8 'Bug'

Twitter released its fourth-quarter earnings report Thursday, beating the revenue estimates but falling short in terms of user growth.

Twitter, to the everyone's surprise, blamed Apple for stagnant user growth. According to Twitter officials, a change made by iPhone maker in the iOS 8 cost Twitter 4 million active users.

"Let me just give you some specific numbers as it relates to iOS. So we said we lost four million monthly active users due to the iOS 8 integration. One million of those monthly active users were Twitter owned and operated monthly active users," said Twitter CFO Anthony Noto. "And three million were on Safari, what we call auto-pulling MAUs, and we lost those. We don't expect to get the three million auto-pulling MAUs in Safari back, and that's a non-Twitter owned and operated auto-pulling MAU. The one million, that number was actually higher at a different point in the quarter and we were able to bring it back to just one."

Explaining the issue in details, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said: "On the second part of what Anthony talked about there, there was an unforeseen bug in the release of iOS 8 as it relates to the specific Twitter integration into iOS. That's why it was particular to us. Once we understood the issue, we moved as quickly as we could on multiple fronts to minimize its impact. But it wasn't a one-size-fits-all fix, which is why you've seen some of the complexity that we've seen here in bringing those users back. The problem was complex and affected different users differently."

Twitter's fourth-quarter revenue of $479 million exceeded analyst projections of $453.34 million.