Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with the Elon [look at me] Musk-owned Twitter.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: "Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We're not there yet,"

Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

"We don't yet have daily numbers for iOS, but we suspect the boom-and-bust pattern is similar. Threads took off like a rocket, with its close linkage to Instagram as the booster. However, the developers of Threads will need to fill in missing features and add some new and unique ones if they want to make checking the app a daily habit for users."

Although losing over half of the initial users in a short period might sound discouraging, Zuckerberg told employees that user retention was better than Meta executives expected.

Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off 'normal' and expected retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality,