Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Threads, his company's rival platform to Twitter, will launch Thursday morning.
Zuckerberg used Instagram on Wednesday to confirm the launch of Threads, set for 10 a.m. EDT. His post included a QR code that links to a download page in Apple's App Store.
The Instagram story was in the form of what looked like a virtual ticket, which included the username "Zuck."
The confirmation of Threads' launch came after Twitter boss Elon Musk attracted criticism by announcing a temporary cap on how many posts users can read.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year. Since then, he has fired thousands of employees and charged users $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a "verified" account.
Musk recently limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.
Musk said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped "extreme levels" of data to train their models.
"Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back," one Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, The New York Times reported in December. "LET'S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER."
Zuckerberg in recent months has cut costs at Meta and grappled with questions about whether the company is falling behind in the AI race.
Zuckerberg and Musk have clashed for years, but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run "sanely" irked Musk, eventually leading to them offering each other out for a cage fight.
Meta currently owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
AFP contributed to this story.
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