Instagram’s new Twitter rival, Threads, was downloaded more than 30 million times in the first 16 hours after launch. Within two hours of its launch, Threads, Instagram’s new real-time, public conversation app, garnered over two million downloads, according to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. The download numbers skyrocketed, reaching five million just two hours later and surpassing 10 million by the time Zuckerberg went to bed on Wednesday night. The momentum continued, with over 30 million downloads recorded by Thursday morning.
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Threads quickly attracted attention from prominent Twitter users, including Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira, and Oprah Winfrey, who joined the app and started posting. Users welcomed each other and expressed excitement about reading one another’s posts. At one point, the influx of users caused the app to experience instability due to the high demand.
Zuckerberg expressed his satisfaction with the app’s initial success, stating, “This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” He described it as the beginning of something special. The strong initial momentum highlighted people’s eagerness to find an alternative to Twitter, the long-standing digital town square. Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has resulted in changes that have frustrated many long-time users, particularly regarding content moderation. Twitter has also faced issues with outages and bugs.
However, Musk did not remain silent in response to Zuckerberg’s actions. In a letter dated Wednesday, Twitter’s lawyers threatened legal action against Meta, accusing the company of using trade secrets from former Twitter employees to develop Threads. Twitter also requested that Meta preserve internal documents relevant to the dispute between the two companies. Musk tweeted on Thursday, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, also took a jab at Zuckerberg’s new app, tweeting, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones.”
The strong uptake of Threads reflects the public’s appetite for an alternative platform, while the legal tensions between Meta and Twitter indicate the intensifying competition between the two companies in the social media space.
