Twitter shares plunge on weak revenue guidance

Twitter's stock is getting battered, down roughly 16% after its Q1 earnings and its revenue forecast came in well below Wall Street expectations.

To make matters worse, Twitter's results were leaked early, creating a chaotic earnings day for the company.

Here are some of the key numbers:

• Revenue of $436 million, up 74% year-on-year, but below its own forecast and the average analyst estimate of $456.8 million.
• Q2 revenue guidance of $470 million to $485 million, well below the $538.2 million expected by analysts.
• Monthly active users of 302 million at end of Q1, in line with Twitter's forecast and analyst expectations.
• EPS excluding certain items of $0.07, ahead of the $0.04 expected by analysts.
  
  

Twitter's Q1 results were due to be released after market close on Tuesday, but research firm Selerity somehow got the numbers early and tweeted out the key figures.

Twitter's stock fell more than 6% before trading in its stock was halted at 3:27pm Eastern Time. Trading resumed at 3:47pm Eastern Time and the stock quickly slipped further.

CEO Dick Costolo has been under pressure to deliver. The company's stock has surged 24% in the past three months on expectations that user growth will re-accelerate after a disappointing Q4.

Twitter added a scant 4 million new MAUs in Q4, but the company said that was due to some one-time factors, including a bug in how its service operates with Apple's latest mobile software, and seasonality. Company executives said user growth would rebound to its typical level of between 13 million and 16 million additional MAUs during the first three months of the year.

Twitter has unleashed a flurry of new products over the past several months, all of which are designed to expand its total number of users and to entice its existing users to spend more time on the service. Among the new offerings are Instant Timeline, which automatically creates a feed with interesting content for new users to peruse, and Periscope, a live-streaming app that Twitter recently acquired.

The San Francisco-based social networking firm's service is a favorite among journalists, politicians and celebrities, but there are concerns on Wall Street that Twitter does not have the mass appeal of a Facebook (which boasts more than 1.4 billion users), or of other fast-growing mobile apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

We'll update this page with more details once earnings cross the wire. Refresh your browser or hit this link.