Twitter Q3: Revenue solid, but user growth stalls at 320 million MAUs

Twitter published third quarter financial results Tuesday after the bell, marking the first quarterly report since Jack Dorsey took over as the company's permanent CEO earlier this month.

The social network posted a net loss of $132 million, or 20 cents per share (statement).

Non-GAAP earnings were 10 cents per share on a revenue of $569 million, up 58 percent year-over-year.

Wall Street was looking for earnings of five cents per share with $559 million in revenue.

But as is always the case with Twitter, user growth and monthly active users (MAUs) remained a top interest for analysts.

Twitter reported 320 million MAUs for the quarter (80 percent from mobile) versus the 324 million expected by analysts. That means Twitter only added 4 million active users for the entire quarter, having ended its Q2 with approximately 316 million MAUs worldwide.

Even with the stalled growth, Twitter still managed an MAU increase of 11 percent year-over-year.

Looking ahead to Q4, Twitter expects revenue between $695 million to $710 million. That falls far below Wall Street's expectation of $740 million.

As a result, Twitter shares plunged more than 10 percent in after hours trading following the report.

In prepared remarks, an optimistic Dorsey said he was pleased with Twitter's progress around the three main focus areas he outlined when he took over as CEO.

"We continued to see strong financial performance this quarter, as well as meaningful progress across our three areas of focus: ensuring more disciplined execution, simplifying our services, and better communicating the value of our platform," Dorsey said. "We've simplified our roadmap and organization around a few big bets across Twitter, Periscope, and Vine that we believe represent our largest opportunities for growth."