Twitter traffic is ‘tanking’ as Meta’s Threads hits more than 100 million users within a week
Tens of millions of people are signing up for Meta’s new rival Threads service while Twitter suffers a wave of outages.
There have been numerous reports of outages on Twitter over the past 24 hours, with problems seemingly escalating around 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, according to Downdetector data. Users report glitches to Downdetector, which accumulates data on them.
Twitter’s desktop service appears to be responsible for about 70% of its outages, according to Downdetector. The mobile app accounted for only 13% of the total.
In recent days, Twitter’s TweetDeck service, which helps users manage multiple Twitter conversations, has also been down due to the company’s announcement that only verified users will be able to access it. According to the data, the primary problem appears to be with the Twitter core app.
As of Friday morning, the Threads app has racked up 70 million sign-ups just a day after its official release, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In response to the app’s immediate popularity, Zuckerberg said, “Way beyond our expectations.”.
The new CEO of Twitter, Linda Yaccarino, who succeeded Elon Musk a month ago, tweeted Thursday that Threads was “often imitated” by the company.
There has been a decrease in Twitter traffic since Meta’s text-based platform Threads launched last week, which has already surpassed 100 million sign-ups.
In the U.S., Threads debuted on Wednesday and is being billed as a more positive “public square” for communities “that never really embraced Twitter.” So far, users seem to like it.
Over the weekend, Threads reached 100 million signups. We haven’t even turned on many promotions yet, so it’s mostly organic demand. I can’t believe it’s only been five days! ” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Monday.
According to Similarweb, a data company that specializes in web analytics, web traffic to Twitter was down 5% for the first two full days Threads was generally available compared with the previous week. The company said Twitter’s web traffic is down 11% compared with the same days in 2022.
Twitter responded to CNBC’s request for comment with an automated response. Meta didn’t offer additional comment beyond Zuckerberg’s post.
The booming growth on Threads is helped by the fact that it is tied to an existing social network, Meta’s Instagram. Users can sign up with their existing handles on Instagram and are able to retain some of their following as others sign up for the app.
Threads reached the 100 million milestone even faster than OpenAI’s generative chatbot ChatGPT, which surpassed 100 million monthly users in two months.
The app still has lots of room to grow, having not yet launched in Europe, where Mosseri said there is still some regulatory complexity to navigate. If Threads is able to retain its userbase, it could solidify its position as a real competitor for Twitter, which reported nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users in its last quarterly earnings report as public company last summer.
Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have already shown some concern about Threads, as his longtime lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter to Meta accusing the company of “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets.
Musk and Zuckerberg were also taking shots at one another over the weekend, as Zuckerberg mocked Musk’s tweet style and Musk called Zuckerberg a derogatory name