Instagram’s Threads Surpasses 100 Million Users

Tom Jowitt,
Linkedin
Threads, Instagram, Meta, Twitter rival

Worrying sign for Elon, as Zuckerberg’s Threads app surpasses 100 million users in less than a week since launch

More worrying news for Elon Musk’s Twitter, after the number of users of a newly launch rival service continues to grow.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta fully launched the Threads app last Thursday, and very quickly it surpassed 30 million sign ups, amid warnings from analysts it could pose a genuine threat to Twitter.

Now the Verge has reported that Instagram’s new Threads app has already surpassed 100 million users, meaning it reached the milestone dramatically faster than even OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Threads logo.
Image credit Meta Platforms

Threads growth

According to the Verge, the number of users can be found in the Instagram app, which tracks the size of the Threads userbase.

Threads is being touted as a “friendly” alternative to Twitter and it proved to be an early hit almost immediately. Indeed, most user reviews of the new social media app are nearly all positive, and it comes after months of turmoil at Twitter, with the latest being it limiting the number of tweets users can see.

Indeed within the first new hours of Threads being available, it racked up 2 million users and then soon rose to 5 million, then 10 million, then 30 million, and then 70 million.

The launch has been “way beyond our expectations,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said on Friday.

And it should be remembered that those 100 million users do not yet include any users within the European Union, as Threads is not available within the bloc due to uncertainty over EU data privacy legislation.

Of course, a good amount of these new sign-ups are likely to be disenchanted users unhappy at the current state of Twitter, under the controversial ownership of Elon Musk.

It should be noted that the 100 million users are still some way behind Twitter, which had 229 million monthly active users as of May 2022 – the last time the firm publicly disclosed such a figure.

But last November Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter had around 260 million monetisable daily active users.

Mastodon meanwhile is said to have 1.7 million monthly active users, while Bluesky has surpassed 1 million downloads.

And to make matters worse, Twitter’s website traffic is allegedly “tanking”, according to the chief of the internet services company Cloudflare.

On Sunday, Matthew Prince posted a graph from Cloudflare’s ranking of the most popular websites in the world showing Twitter has been in decline since the start of 2023, not long after Elon Musk took over the platform, the Guardian reported.

Legal threat

Last week X Corp’s (owner of Twitter) lawyer Alex Spiro threatened to sue Meta in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, accusing Meta of the “wilful” misappropriation of trade secrets.

In the letter, Spiro alleged that Meta’s Threads was built by former Twitter employees “deliberately assigned” to develop a “copycat” app.

However Meta has been developing Threads since August 2019.

And Spiro offered no concrete examples of Twitter employees using trade secrets to build the app, and Meta has insisted that no Threads engineers are former Twitter staff.

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Andy Stone, Meta communications director, posted on Threads last week. “That’s just not a thing.”

Musk insults

Musk of course last month publicly challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight – a challenge that Mark Zuckerberg accepted.

Then on Monday Musk suggested he and Mark Zuckerberg should have “a literal dick-measuring contest” in the latest broadside aimed at his rival billionaire.

Musk then added a ruler emoji.

Musk also used a slang word for “cuckold”, popular in rightwing circles as a term of derision, when he also tweeted: “Zuck is a cuck.”