Berlin, 7 July 2023 (dpa/MIA) - Twitter is threatening to sue Facebook's parent company Meta over its newly-launched rival app Threads, a report by news website Semafor said on Thursday.

Threads attracted more than 10 million users within hours of being launched by Facebook parent company Meta, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced.

The new platform, which closely resembles Twitter's format, is connected to Meta's Instagram photo and video app. Analysts believe this could be a huge boost given it can draw on more than 1 billion current Instagram users.

Semafor published a copy of a letter it said had been sent by a Twitter lawyer, accusing Meta of using confidential information on the short message service for Threads.

Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro alleged Meta had hired dozens of ex-employees of Elon Musk's company, who were privy to internal memos.

Tech billionaire Musk has laid off thousands of Twitter employees since his takeover of the service last October. Many of them subsequently found new jobs at other tech companies.

Meta has denied the allegations, Semafor said. There were no former Twitter employees working in the Threads development team, the firm was quoted as saying.

Zuckerberg said it took just seven hours for Threads to pass the 10-million-user mark.

Threads is available in the United States and more than 100 other countries but not in the European Union, which Meta said is due to unanswered regulatory questions there.

Instagram executive Adam Mosseri indicated in interviews that new EU regulations under the bloc's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, which will take effect in the coming year, present a hurdle. The laws contain strict requirements for large online platforms.

In an interview with tech industry news outlet Platformer, Mosseri defended the decision to start without EU users.

The company was forced to choose to either exclude EU-based users or "delay the launch by many, many, many months," he said. "And I was worried that our window would close, because timing is important."

Threads' launch comes at a particularly turbulent time for Twitter, which has been troubled by chaos and instability since it was taken over by Musk.

Twitter again angered users over the weekend by imposing a drastic new cap on the number of tweets users can see per day.

After Threads launched, Musk was defiant in a tweet.

"It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram," Musk wrote.

Twitter has not released any updated user figures since Musk took over. But Twitter had previously reported having more than 300 million users.

Text posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and can contain links, photos and videos up to five minutes in length.

When Twitter was launched in 2006, the text limit was originally 140 characters, which was later doubled to 280 characters.

Musk has experimented with even longer character limits for paying subscribers to Twitter's premium service.

Photo: MIA archive