Microblogging site Twitter Inc’s CFO Anthony Noto claims that approximately 4 million of its users was lost from the social network due to the rollout of iOS 8 with an unforeseen bug in the release of the new operating system as it related to Twitter which was a drag on user growth, practically blaming it on Apple during an earnings call since Twitter reported 288 million monthly active users for Q4 2014 which wasn’t at all impressive after 292 million users was expected by WallStreet.
Business Insider explains, 3 million active users were lost after Apple stopped auto-polling Twitter feeds for Safari’s Shared Links feature. In iOS 8 this feature has been shifted to use a manual refresh, while a further 1 million were lost due to encryption changes in iOS 8 that caused trouble for some users attempting to log in. Twitter CFO Anthony Noto later quantified the loss, saying that the bug cost Twitter some 4 million new users, saying that could have bumped Twitter’s monthly active users.
It is unclear to which bug Costolo was referring to but so far, Twitter was one of Apple’s first partners for social media integration in iOS, and remains the one with which Apple works most closely.
