A little more than 24 hours after its introduction, the Twitter competitor app Threads has surpassed 50 million users and seen close to 100 million postings.
The anticipated app was released by the owner of Instagram and Facebook at midnight on Wednesday, and it has now received 190 million likes.
In his conflict with Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has scored a significant win.
Because of Threads, Twitter has threatened to sue Meta on the grounds that it misappropriated trade secrets. However, Meta has retaliated by making it seem as though no former Twitter workers collaborated in the app’s development or utilized insider information.
At around 4 p.m. UK time yesterday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted on Threads that more than 30 million people had downloaded his new competing messaging service.
Eight hours later, around midnight UK time, Alex Heath, editor of the news website The Verge, posted on Threads with the following statement: “This app has exceeded 48 million sign-ups, per internal Metadata shared with me.”
A little over 24 hours later, at 1 am this morning, digital communications specialist Joe Scannell of New York announced that the app had received 50 million sign-ups, calling the total of 50,086,772 “wild.”
It comes after a lawyer for Twitter wrote Mr. Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter stating that Threads is a “copycat” of the Musk-owned network.
Meta was charged with “systematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” according to Alex Spiro, the lawyer representing Twitter.
The letter, which was originally made public by Semafor, charged Meta of recruiting ‘dozens’ of former Twitter workers who ‘have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly private information.
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, stated in a tweet last evening in reference to the letter: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
