Twitter is blaming science firm Selerity and NASDAQ for the 18 percent drop in the shareprice of the popular microblogging site on Tuesday because of the leak of Twitter's quarterly result on - where else, but Twitter.

NASDAQ manages Twitter's investor relations site. Twitter instructed NASDAQ not to post its earnings data until the close of the market, but NASDAQ made it available and Selerity tweeted Twitter's earnings information, reports Wired.

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While Twitter's Q1 2015 revenue increased to $436 million, it failed to meet analysts' expectation of $456.5 million. It was also short by 1.4 million of mobile monthly users which reached only 241.6 million, while expectation was 243 million.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, in a statement, explained the decline in revenue growth to lower-than-expected contribution from some of its newer direct response products to make the company's service more accessible to new users.

The new products include strangers having the ability to send direct messages to each other, auto-filling Instant Timeline for Android users and surfacing the most popular tweets missed by the users from their feeds.

Costolo did not identify which of these new products contributed to its revenue lesser than expectations.

For the first quarter, total monthly users of Twitter went up to 302 million, higher than 18 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year. That was because of the signing up of 4 million new users, although it was the smallest quarter-over-quarter increase for Twitter.

One area, though, that Twitter beat analysts' expectation is adjusted earnings which was 7 cents per share compared to 4 cents per share estimate of analysts.

During the earnings call, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto admitted a slower start for the second quarter. By Q2, Twitter would include Twitter members who are SMS-only users, mostly from the emerging markets.

Besides suffering from slower user growth, monetization is also not living up to expectations, observed BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield. "That's why the stock is selling off so hard. The question is, How much of this is Twitter's own missteps versus how much of this is peers such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat eating into their advertising?" he elaborates.

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