Struggling social media giant Twitter stated on Thursday that it overstated its monthly user figures since 2014. According to a report in the New York Times, Twitter said that it mistakenly including data from third-party applications while counting.
The company made this announcement as it net loss narrowed in the third quarter and the number of daily active users rose 14%.
Twitter’s net loss for the quarter narrowed to $21.1 million from $102.9 million loss for the same period last year. The company’s revenue declined 4% to $590 million.
Twitter said that while measuring monthly active users, it was incorrectly including figures from third-party applications that used a software-development program called Digits, which allowed third-party applications send authentication messages through Twitter’s systems, but that did not reflect activity on the Twitter platform.
According to NYT, Digits is part of the Fabric mobile application platform that Twitter sold to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, this year.
“Our estimates suggest the prior period adjustments are smaller than those in the fourth quarter of 2016,” NYT quotes the company as saying.
After recognizing this error, Twitter lowered its number of monthly active users by two million for the first and second quarters of this year and by one million for the fourth quarter of 2016.
NYT reports that Twitter saw a rise not only in daily active users but also saw a 4% increase in monthly active users from the same period last year, to 330 million.
The company had 326 million monthly active users in the second quarter.
While the disclosure from the company didn’t seem to have affected investors, as shares of the company rose 10% in premarket trading on Thursday, the company’s reputation could take a hit, especially after it is dealing with scrutiny over its role in Russia’s efforts to meddle in the presidential election and the lack of effort from the social media giant to prevent abuse on its platform.