Washington, Jun 14 (IANS): As the news of Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of the professional networking website LinkedIn made the headlines on Tuesday, the shares of micro-blogging website Twitter went up more than eight percent in early-morning trading.

Why? According to media reports, Microsoft-LinkedIn acquisition in the enterprise social media space has rekindled hope for Twitter which is affected by stalled user growth.

If Twitter shares stay up for some time, it is a clear signal that investors would rather see it in someone else’s hands, Re/Code reported on Tuesday.

Google is rumoured to be ahead in the race to acquire Twitter. Another key global media player Comcast may also join the race, the report added.

The 10-year-old Twitter is facing stalled user growth and growing competition for quite some time. A sequential decline in its monthly active users (MAUs) base triggered a sharp fall for Twitter shares as the company announced its fourth quarter results recently.

The micro-blogging site reported 305 million monthly active users for the fourth quarter, compared to 307 million in the third quarter that excluded SMS-only followers.

As many top-notch executives have quit the company in the recent past, Twitter is going through a major overhaul under Jack Dorsey, the new CEO.

According to Dorsey, the engagement on Twitter is growing. Direct messages are up about 50 percent year-over-year and tweets shared via direct message are up more than 75 percent quarter-over-quarter.

"We've seen increases in tweets and replies and retweets and also likes. We want to continue to make sure we are refining that timeline and making it better and better," Dorsey was quoted as saying.

Dorsey has hinted that Twitter's deal with the National Football League (NFL) to stream 10 games this fall will help the company earn better traffic.

Recent reports claimed that over 32 million Twitter passwords may have been compromised by locking accounts that demand extra protection and requiring a password reset.

LeakedSource said the cache of Twitter data contains 32,888,300 records, including email addresses, usernames and passwords.

It's not clear how many accounts Twitter chose to lock, but the company told the Wall Street Journal the number was in the millions, and that those affected will have already received an e-mail explaining the situation.