Twitter added new users by 1.8 percent in the fourth quarter, down from 4.8 in the third quarter. The company cites various bugs, including Apple's latest iOS, 8 as some of the reasons why Twitter did not have a strong quarter for growth.

Twitter's CFO Anthony Noto said that two separate issues with Apple's iOS 8 caused a loss of 4 million active monthly users in the fourth quarter, TechCrunch reported. He said when Apple updated to iOS 8, Twitter encountered issues that caused a loss of 1 million active monthly users.

Twitter's issues with iOS 8 could have caused people to give up on signing up for Twitter when they encountered errors. Twitter executives called the situation "an unforeseen bug" in the Twitter integration with iOS 8.  New users might not have been getting the experience they thought they would receive from Twitter when they first signed up. This could be another reason for the drop in growth. 

Those new to Twitter had to find the people they wanted to follow and also find a way to get followed. If they failed at this, the likely option would be to give up.

In addition, Noto added there was also an issue with the latest version of Safari that caused a loss of 3 million more active monthly users.

Going forward, Twitter has added the Instant Timeline that will display interesting tweets to new users. They also are beginning to display Timeline Highlights, which are tweets they may have missed while away from Twitter from the people they follow. 

Twitter now has 288 million average monthly active users.

Noto has confidence that new features like the Instant Timeline will allow Twitter to continue its growth that it enjoyed in the first three quarters of 2014 of around 14 million users added.

Meanwhile, with a much larger subscribers base, Facebook grew by 3.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014.

What do you think of Twitter's growth starting to slow down? Leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.