Nasdaq is facing more fallout as it prematurely released yet another company’s earnings Tuesday, according to Bloomberg.
Twitter’s stock price fell more than 7% after Nasdaq unit Shareholder.com accidentally posted the company’s earnings release on its website for 45 seconds about an hour before the results were due to go public, Bloomberg said.
Trading in Twitter shares was halted, but after resumption the stock then fell as much as 20%, closing down 18.2% on lower-than expected revenue and earnings forecasts. Twitter shares were down another 8% on Wednesday.
“The posting was caused by an operational issue that exposed the release on Twitter’s [investor relations] website for approximately 45 seconds,” Nasdaq spokesman Joseph Christinat told Bloomberg. “During those seconds the site was scraped by a third party that publicly disseminated the earnings information. We regret the incident.”
The third party, Selerity, tweeted the earnings numbers.
The mistake follows Shareholder.com’s earlier premature release of JPMorgan Chase’s third-quarter earnings in October 2014. After that incident, Nasdaq spokesman Ryan Wells reportedly emailed Bloomberg that the “root cause was a human error internally at Shareholder.com.”
In addition to those mishaps, Nasdaq errors also delayed the opening of Facebook’s IPO in 2012 and halted trading of all of the exchange’s listed companies for more than three hours in August 2013 due to a malfunction of its Securities Information Processor, Larry Tabb, chief executive officer of research firm Tabb Group, said.
“This pre-release of Twitter’s earnings was not good for the brand, especially after Facebook and some of the challenges with the SIP, it doesn’t help,” Tabb told Bloomberg. “They are an exchange and they’re held to a higher level of scrutiny and so it’s critical for them to get this right.”
Nasdaq is already facing increased competition from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and Bats Global Markets, which overtook Nasdaq earlier this year as the second-biggest exchange operator in the United States by trading volume.
