Twitter lost 4 million of their users in 2014

During Twitter's 2014 fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company's executives said that the number of monthly active users of the popular microblogging service recorded a lower-than-expected growth in the quarter.
With monthly active users considered as a benchmark of growth for the social network, Twitter said that it had a total of 288 million users at the end of 2014. The figures reported by Twitter show that the company missed the Wall Street analysts' expectations of 292 million users at the end of the year.
Twitter also revealed that it lost 4 million users in the 2014 fourth-quarter; with the result that the company witnessed only a 20 percent year-on-year increase in the number of users in the 2014 last quarter as compared to the same quarter the previous year.
With regard to the reason behind the loss of 4 million users in the latest quarter, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo said during the company's earnings call that the loss of users was largely a consequence of the fact that an "unforeseen bug" in the release of Apple's iOS 8.
According to Twitter, nearly 3 million users were lost by the company in the 2014 fourth-quarter owing to a change made by Apple to the Shared Links feature - which displays links from people's Twitter followers - in the mobile Safari browser; while one million users were lost because of an encryption issue related to Twitter's integration with iOS.