Twitter miscounted its daily users for three years straight
witter overstated the number of daily users on its service for three years straight, overcounting by up to 1.9 million users each quarter. The error was due to Twitter inadvertently counting multiple accounts as active when they were all tied to a single user, even if they weren’t all in use. These incorrect usage numbers were given for Q1 2019 through Q4 2021.
This is, somehow, not the first time Twitter has done this. In 2017, Twitter also realized it had been overstating its user figures by about 1 million to 2 million users for three years. The repeat mistake was revealed today in Twitter’s earnings release for the first quarter of 2022.
The updated figures aren’t exactly a game-changer: Twitter now has 229 million daily users, which is still up more than 10 million, even from last quarter’s inflated number. But they are one final embarrassing slip-up for Twitter as the company wrangles a deal to be taken private, at which point it will no longer have to share these figures publicly.
Twitter reported an operating loss of $128 million on revenue of $1.2 billion, both in line with its own guidance for the quarter. Revenue rose 16 percent year over year, with Twitter citing “headwinds associated with the war in Ukraine.”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/28/23046170/twitter-miscounted-daily-users-three-years-q1-2022-earnings