Twitter traffic takes a deep dive as Threads popularity explodes

Twitter has been suffering from a series of issues lately with “data scraping and system manipulation” plaguing the platform. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, people have been skeptical of the way Twitter is being run, and several eminent personalities such as Elton John and Jim Carrey have taken the extreme step of even quitting the platform. The microblogging site also suffered a big outage on July 1 with over 4000 people reporting problems like “Cannot retrieve tweets”, downdetector.com revealed. Add to that, Musk’s penchant for making changes at the spur-of-the-moment that hamper subscribers in various ways. All this has affected Twitter’s popularity and its traffic is dropping. And that will be a big worry for shareholders who would want to hold Musk accountable for it.

Twitter’s drop in traffic

Cloudflare CEO posted a graph on Twitter and Threads on Monday, showing Twitter’s DNS ranking from January till date, and it doesn’t make good viewing for the Musk-owned platform. The graph depicts a consistent drop in traffic over the course of the year, and its lowest point this year has coincided with the launch of Instagram’s new Twitter rival, Threads, as per a report by The Verge. While Twitter has now dropped to the 37th rank this month, Threads popularity has exploded with over 50 million users in 24 hours and 97 million users in a week.

This news comes amidst Twitter’s lawsuit threat to Meta over “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and intellectual property”. According to a report by The Verge, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro claimed Meta had hired “dozens” of former Twitter employees to build Threads.

Musk vs Zuckerberg

But it’s not just a battle between the companies, as Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have also been engaged in a war of words. Musk, last month, challenged Zuckerberg to a “cage match”, to which his response was “Send Me Location,” a catchphrase previously used by decorated UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov.

Moreover, Musk called the Meta CEO a “cuck” on Sunday, in response to a screenshot of Zuckerberg’s reply to a post by the American fast food chain Wendy’s on Threads. Soon after, Zuckerberg also appeared to be trolling Musk with one-word replies on Threads. Replying to a post on the platform, the Meta CEO commented “concerning”, with a laughing emoji.