Twitter said Thursday it would cut 9 percent of its global workforce to keep costs down, although the microblogging service reported better than expected quarterly results. Third-quarter revenue growth slowed sharply in the third quarter. The company's revenue rose about 8 percent to $616 million. The company reported a 20 percent rise in revenue in the previous quarter and 58 percent last year.

Average monthly active users (MAUs) were 317 million for the quarter, up 3% year-over-year and compared to 313 million in the previous quarter. Average daily active usage (DAU) grew 7% year-over- year, an acceleration from 5% in Q2 and 3% in Q1.

Total advertising revenue of $545 million grew 6 percent year-over-year. Mobile advertising revenue was 90% of total advertising revenue.

Data licensing and other revenue totaled $71 million, an increase of 26% year-over-year. U.S. revenue totaled $374 million, an increase of 1% year-over-year. International revenue totaled $242 million, an increase of 21% year-over-year.

Twitter also announced a restructuring and reduction in headcount of approximately 9% of its global workforce. The restructuring, which focuses primarily on reorganizing t he company’s sales, partnerships, and marketing efforts, is intended to create greater focus and efficiency to enable Twitter’s goal of driving toward GAAP profitability in 2017.

"We're getting more disciplined about how we invest in the business, and we set a company goal of driving toward GAAP profitability in 2017," said Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto.

Twitter hired bankers last month to field acquisition offers, but it has seen a dearth of potential bidders after Salesforce.com Inc, the last of the companies believed to be interested in buying the company, said it was not interested in a purchase.

The company said it expected cash expenditures of about $10 million to $20 million in the fourth quarter, mostly in severance costs.

Twitter's growth stalled this year after it exceeded 300 million active monthly users, less than a fifth of Facebook's users and below Facebook's Instagram.

Twitter also plans to discontinue the video-sharing mobile app Vine. The social media services said that the Vine website would stay live even after the mobile app is discontinued, giving users the chance to download and save any videos.

Twitter also said it would roll out updates next month affecting how it protects users from abusive content, an issue for which the company has endured growing criticism.

In a letter to shareholders, Twitter said that in order to drive daily active usage, the company is refining its core service in four key areas: onboarding, the home timeline, notifications and Tweeting.

Twitter plans further enhance the timeline in order to increase Tweet impressions and users' engagement The timeline will continue to improve over time as Twiter's machine learning systems get better. Twitter promised that the notifications will soon be more than text, displaying rich media messages as well. In addition, Tweeter will let people not only broadcast to the world but also"have deeper, open conversations about the topics they care about."

In terms of live video streaming, Twitter has integrated its video player with several partners including Yahoo, AOL, SB Nation, and Sports Illustrated on the web and Apple TV, Amazon Fire, and Microsoft XBox on connected TVs. The company expects to add more syndication partners in the coming months.