Threads App Set to Gain 100 Million Users in Under a Week, Elon Musk’s Twitter Reportedly Sees Traffic Drop

Threads is set to record 100 million registered users, less than a week after Facebook parent Meta launched its new microblogging platform. The company's app is closely linked to a user's Instagram account and is positioned as an alternative to services like Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk last year. Days after it was rolled out globally (except in the EU), the app has seen a meteoric rise in users signing up for the service, hitting new milestones every day. Threads has been able to achieve this fast rate of growth because Meta tied the service to Instagram, which has over 2.35 billion monthly active users.

Last week, Meta launched threads and began to add temporary “account numbers” on Instagram to denote which users had signed up for the new microblogging service. These numbers are also an indication of how many users have signed up for the service, as they are issued to users in a chronological order. As per a website that is tracking these figures, the number of users on Threads passed the 99 million mark earlier on Monday.

With only a couple of updates since it was launched, Threads still lacks several features found on other microblogging services such as Twitter and Mastodon. These include private messaging (DMs) and a functional search feature. The company is now allowing users to sign up to test beta versions of the Threads app on Android via the Google Play store and try new features before they are released to the public.

It's also worth noting that due to the tight integration with Instagram, deleting your Threads account profile will currently delete your Instagram account. According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, the company is working on a solution that will allow users to delete their Threads account separately. In the meanwhile, users can deactivate their Threads account which will hide their profile and posts on the platform, he added.

The blistering pace at which Threads keeps adding new users appears to have unsettled rival Twitter, which has reportedly threatened to sue Facebook parent Meta over the alleged theft of trade secrets. The firm claims that Meta hired workers laid off last year by Elon Musk after he took over the platform, and “deliberately” tasked them with working on Threads. Musk also made a derogatory comment about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday, signalling that the quick rise of Threads has caused some consternation at Twitter.

While Threads is set to cross the 100 million user mark in less than a week, it remains to be seen how many users remain active on the platform.  Meanwhile, Twitter's DNS ranking has seen a drop over the first six months of the year, according to data shared by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on Threads (via The Verge).

The screenshot of the DNS ranking for Twitter's primary domain showed a dive from January to July. Meanwhile, Twitter is currently ranked 184 on the Cloudflare Radar Top 200 Domains list. This corroborates data shared by SimilarWeb earlier this year that showed Twitter traffic has seen a decline since the beginning of the year.