Instagram Threads hits 100 million users, becoming easily the fastest growing app ever

Instagram’s Threads app has reached 100 million users, making it easily the fastest growing app ever.

The site reached the number early on Monday morning, according to a tracker that looks at the numbers that are made public on each Threads account.

The previous fastest growing app was OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But it took that site two months to reach 100 million users.

Threads, which was released late on Wednesday, has taken only a few days to reach the same number. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has released a number of updates throughout those days, saying that the growth was “way beyond our expectations”: it hit two million in two hours, and ten million in seven hours, he had said.

Twitter had 229 million monthly active users in May 2022, according to a statement made before Elon Musk bought it late last year, while more recent data from Statista puts the figure at 436 million.

Twitter responded on Thursday by threatening to sue Meta, according to the publication Semafor, citing a letter delivered to Zuckerberg by a lawyer for Twitter. Twitter was not immediately available for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the Semafor report.

Meta said no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.

The rise of threads has negatively impacted traffic to Twitter, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Numerous competitors to Twitter have sprung up following Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform last year, which was followed by a series of chaotic decisions that have alienated both users and advertisers. Musk’s latest move involved limiting the number of tweets users can read per day.

Twitter‘s stumbles make room for a well-funded competitor like Meta Platforms, analysts and experts said, particularly because of its access to Instagram users and its advertising strength.

“Meta’s release of Threads came at the perfect time to give it a fighting chance to unseat Twitter,” said Niklas Myhr, professor of marketing at Chapman University, referring to the turmoil at Twitter after it limited the number of tweets users can see.

“Threads will be off to a running start as it is built upon the Instagram platform with its massive user base and if users adopt Threads, advertisers will be following closely behind.”

Other competitors have found limited success. Mastodon, another Twitter-like app, has 1.7 million monthly active users, according to its website, while Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky has about 265,000 users.

Additional reporting by Reuters