KAnYjiImWhat do Twitter and Microsoft have in common? They both have had quarterly earnings reports found and released early by Selerity, a company that crawls the web for financial information and then releases it to its clients.

During its conference call with financial analysts today, the social networking company blamed NASDAQ, which operates its investor relations site, for posting its earnings to the web early, even though they weren’t linked anywhere on the site. That allowed Selerity to swoop in and report the news early, which was bad news for Twitter, since it did not live up to analyst expectations. The company’s share price dropped more than 18 percent before the close of trading, and is down almost 2 percent in after hours trading as of this writing.

Microsoft faced a similar problem in 2011, when Selerity unveiled the Redmond-based company’s fiscal second quarter earnings at 2:50 p.m. Eastern Time, more than an hour prior to the close of the market. The difference between the two cases is that Microsoft’s results beat the analyst consensus, unlike Twitter which had a much weaker quarter. (At that time, the company’s stock actually jumped upwards on the news.)

Despite the four year difference between the incidents, one thing remained the same: in both cases, Selerity tweeted about the information (which it was able to gather from a publicly-available area of both companies’ investor sites) after finding it.

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