Twitter beat Wall Street's expectations for its third-quarter earnings and said it could finally turn a profit next quarter.

But the company said it had overstated monthly users for the past three years.

Twitter still won't reveal exactly how many daily users it has.



Twitter slightly beat Wall Street's expectations for its third-quarter earnings but reported that it had overstated monthly users since late 2014.

The company on Thursday said it added 4 million monthly users during the third quarter and grew daily users by 14%, a much-needed improvement from the zero new users added during the previous quarter. Thanks to cost-cutting across the business, Twitter said it could finally turn a bottom-line, unadjusted profit in the fourth quarter.

But the embattled social network also revealed that it had miscalculated monthly users since the fourth quarter of 2014 by including third-party, text-based apps related to its shuttered developer platform, Fabric. As a result, it lowered previously reported user numbers by 1 million for the fourth quarter of 2016 and by 2 million for the first two quarters of 2017.

Despite the previously overstated metrics and 4% decline in ad revenue from this time last year, Twitter's growth results and signs of approaching profitability sent shares soaring 12% in premarket trading on Thursday.

Twitter again refused to disclose its total number of daily users, a key growth metric the company has fought to withhold because it doesn't want to be compared against other social networks like Snapchat. During Thursday's earnings call with investors, CFO Ned Segal said Twitter's number of daily active users continued to be less than half that of its monthly users.

Here are the key numbers from Twitter's Q3 earnings: