What's going on?

After much talk about its declining stock price and the re-introduction of Jack Dorsey as CEO, Twitter announced its 4th quarter results late on Wednesday.

What does this mean?

Monthly active users (MAUs) is a key metric for many tech companies: it means the number of customers that actively use their services each month. Twitter�sdeclined for the first time as it lost 2 million users between the 3rd and 4th quarter of last year. That�s less than 1% of its total user base, but investors in tech companies expect growth, not contraction.

The good news is that Twitter said users have bounced back in January to its 3rd quarter level. In an attempt to improve the service, Twitter has introduced some new features, like �Moments,� and on Wednesday, it started putting video ads and top tweets at the top of people�s timelines. But, Twitter also said that it expected to make less revenue in the first quarter of 2016 than investors were expecting.

Why should I care?

For the stock: Twitter still has an attractive platform � and it wouldn�t cost too much for someone to buy it. The platform is used by over 300 million MAUs � and it�s unique. Tweets aren�t going to disappear anytime soon. The fact that Twitter has such an attractive platform means it might make sense for another company to buy it � and that could prevent the stock from falling too much further from here.

Bigger picture: Tech has struggled this year. Twitter stock is down more than 30%, Yelp has almost halved and LinkedIn fell almost 50% in just one day last week. Even the tech giants who reported good results, like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, have seen their stocks sell off quite a bit versus their recent highs. The former group appears more fundamentally challenged while the latter group might simply be victims of a general decline in stocks that have done very well in the past year (as investors get more nervous about the broader markets).