Elon Musk's Twitter reportedly sees a drop in traffic, while the Threads app is expected to gain 100 million users in less than a week.

 Elon Musk posted a disparaging message to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, indicating that Twitter has been alarmed about Threads' rapid development.

A little more than a week after Facebook parent company Meta unveiled its new microblogging network, Threads is expected to reach 100 million registered users. A competitor to services like Twitter, which Elon Musk purchased last year, the company's app is intimately connected to a user's Instagram account. The app has experienced a meteoric growth in users joining up for the service in the days following its global rollout (aside from in the EU), with daily milestones being reached. Because Meta connected Threads to Instagram, which has more than 2.35 billion monthly active users, the service was able to grow at such a rapid rate.

Last week, Meta introduced threads and started adding fictitious "account numbers" to Instagram in order to identify which users had registered for the brand-new microblogging platform. Since they are given to users in a chronological manner, these statistics also show how many people have signed up for the service. A website keeping track of these statistics reports that early on Monday, Threads' user base surpassed the 99 million milestone. 

Even after only a few upgrades since its debut, Threads still lacks a number of capabilities offered by competing microblogging platforms like Twitter and Mastodon. Private messaging (DMs) and a useful search tool are some of these. Users may now sign up to test beta versions of the Threads app for Android via the Google Play store and enjoy new features before they are made available to the general public, according to the business.

It's also important to keep in mind that since Threads and Instagram are so closely integrated, removing your Threads account profile will automatically erase your Instagram account. Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, said that the business is working on a solution that will let people remove their Threads accounts independently. Users can deactivate their Threads accounts in the interim, which would make their postings and profile invisible on the network, he added.

Threads' rapid user growth appears to have alarmed Threads' rival Twitter, which has reportedly taken legal action against Facebook parent Meta for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Elon Musk took over the platform last year, and the company alleges that Meta hired staff who had been fired and "deliberately" assigned them to work on Threads. On Sunday, Musk also made a disparaging remark about Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, indicating that Twitter has been alarmed about Threads' rapid ascent.

Though Threads will surpass the 100 million user threshold in less than a week, it is unclear how many of those users will still be active.  According to information posted on Threads by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince (via The Verge), Twitter's DNS ranking has decreased over the course of the first half of the year.

A decline from January to July could be seen in the DNS ranking for Twitter's main domain in the screenshot. On the Cloudflare Radar Top 200 Domains list, Twitter is presently ranked 184. This supports statistics that SimilarWeb provided earlier this year that showed Twitter traffic has decreased since the year's start.