Twitter suffered a backlash on Wall Street after its first set of results as a public company raised fears that its explosive growth of recent years is slowing down.

The micro-blogging website ended the quarter to December 31 with 241 million monthly users, a rise of 30pc on a year earlier but down on some expectations.

The San Francisco-based company's addition of nine million new monthly users was also a slowdown from the previous three quarters, when it was adding an average of 16 million new accounts each quarter.

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Its shares dipped by as much as 12pc in after-hours trading on Wednesday night, even though its revenues more than doubled to a bigger-than-expected 243 million US dollars (£149 million) in the October to December quarter.

The company was launched seven years ago and last year named the UK as its biggest market outside America.

However one of the major challenges facing Twitter is to generate more revenues from outside America. While more than 75pc of users are outside the US, just 26pc of its revenue comes from abroad.