Meta Platforms Inc.’s new social-media platform Threads, a rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, now has 70 million signups, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “70 million sign ups on Threads as of this morning. Way beyond our expectations,” Zuckerberg posted on Friday. The service launched Wednesday night and garnered millions of users in the first few hours, thanks to the ability to onboard via Meta’s popular site Instagram. For now, the app is not available in Europe due to regulatory issues. The app resembles and is directly competing with Twitter at a time when that platform is struggling. Twitter has been bleeding users since Musk irked them by limiting the number of tweets users can view daily and putting TweetDeck behind a paywall. On Thursday, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro sent a letter to Zuckerberg saying that Twitter had “serious concerns” that Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s “trade secrets” and other intellectual property. Meta’s stock was up 0.8% on Friday.
