Twitter traffic ‘tanking’ after record-breaking Threads launch

Mark Zuckerberg’s rival app sees 100 million people sign up in first five days

The number of Twitter users is “tanking” following the release of rival app Threads, according to the head of an internet services company.

Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince shared a graph showing an apparent decline in Twitter’s popularity following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network late last year, with a steep drop appearing at the start of July when tech rival Mark Zuckerberg launched his text-based app.

Separate figures from data intelligence platform Similarweb showed that traffic to Twitter was down 5 per cent in the first two full days that Threads was available, compared with the previous week, while user retention has also declined.

In a report on the trend, Similarweb noted that the drop in user retention is “a bad sign for app user loyalty” for Twitter.

The metric only accounts for people visiting Twitter’s website and not those using the app, with other measures suggesting the number of daily active users steadily increased in the nine months following Mr Musk’s takeover. Twitter does not publish up-to-date user data and did not respond to a request from The Independent for the latest figures.

The launch of Threads last Thursday saw a record number of users flock to the app in its first few days, with Mr Zuckerberg revealing that the app had reached 100 million sign ups on Monday.

“That’s mostly organic demand and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” the Meta boss posted on Threads. “Can’t believe it’s only been five days!”

Recent estimates published by Statista put the number of monthly active Twitter users at around 436 million.

The arrival of Threads comes at a difficult time for Twitter, with Mr Musk recently announcing a limit to the number of tweets users can view after issues with data harvesting on the platform.

Twitter has threatened to sue Threads’ parent company Meta, claiming former Twitter staff were hired to create a “copycat” platform.

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Mr Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro wrote in a letter to Mr Zuckerberg, as reported by Semafor.

“Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

The Independent has reached out to Mr Spiro for further information about any potential legal action.