When Twitter’s earnings were (ironically) posted on Twitter about an hour before they were supposed to come out, Wall Street essentially lost it, sending shares into a nosedive after another disappointing report. Twitter blamed NASDAQ OMX because the stock exchange operator manages its investor relations page. Now NASDAQ has officially admitted to accidentally releasing them early.
Twitter shares were quickly halted after Twitter user Selerity posted the results, and the micro-blogging platform officially released them shortly after.
What a difference 45 seconds makes
In a press release this morning, NASDAQ OMX said a posting error resulted in the earnings release accidentally appearing on Twitter’s investor relations website for about 45 seconds. Talk about being in the right virtual place at the right virtual time. Selerity, which does heavy data mining for hedge funds and other financial services clients, happened to be mining Twitter’s website during those 45 seconds.
Previously, NASDAQ had reportedly told Bloomberg that shareholder.com, its website, accidentally released Twitter’s earnings early.
Twitter stock continued tumbling today after last night’s earnings disappointment. As of this writing, shares were down 5.39% at $39.99 per share.
Twitter disappoints
The micro-blogging platform posted earnings of 7 cents per share, which slightly beat consensus estimates. The big disappointment this time was revenue, which according to CNBC, came up short of even the most bearish analyst estimate.
Perhaps surprisingly, Twitter managed to meet expectations for monthly active users, coming in at 302 million for the first quarter. This metric is the one that Wall Street has been worrying consistently about, as the company has come up short on it in the last several quarterly earnings reports.
Twitter missed on mobile monthly active users, however, which were 80% of the total monthly active users. You may remember that Wall Street worried about Facebook and the mobile transition early in its life as a public company.
Not the first time this has happened
Selerity chose to release Twitter’s earnings report as a way to show off the power of its data mining capabilities. USA Today reported that the page that was mined by Selerity was not able to be seen by the human eye.
This isn’t the first time a company’s earnings report has been released early. Google’s earnings for the third quarter of 2012 were accidentally released early, and the search giant blamed R.R. Donnelley, a financial printing company.
In October, it was believed that NASDAQ’s website shareholder.com also released JPMorgan’s earnings report early. This would mean that Twitter marks the second time shareholder.com released earnings early. In this case though, NASDAQ blamed an “operational issue,” while in JPMorgan’s case, the stock exchange operator blamed “human error.”
