Threads sees 30 million downloads in first few hours, Zuckerberg says

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday that the company’s new social media platform Threads saw 30 million downloads within the first few hours of its launch.

“Wow, 30 million sign ups as of this morning,” Zuckerberg said in a Thursday morning post on Threads. “Feels like the beginning of something special, but we've got a lot of work ahead to build out the app.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned its new platform as an alternative to Twitter, which has faced a chaotic eight months under the leadership of billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Since Musk took over Twitter last fall, he has replaced the platform’s traditional verification scheme with a paid subscription service, removed various content moderation rules, reinstated banned accounts and, most recently, placed limits on how many posts users could view in a day.

“It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg said in another Threads post, adding, “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

Threads faced some setbacks on its first day, however. The European launch of the app was delayed due to privacy concerns, and Twitter threatened to sue Meta over “serious concerns” that the company had gained access to and abused Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property.