Meta’s Twitter/X rival Threads, has lost almost half of the 100m users who signed up within five days of its launch, according to Mark Zuckerberg, the BBC reports.

Zuckerberg made the admission in a call to employees, that was heard by the Reuters news agency. On the call, Zuckerberg said: "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," he said.

But he described the situation as "normal" and said he believed retention rates would improve as new features were added to the app.

Threads is available to download in over 100 countries including the UK, but not yet in the EU, due to regulatory concerns. In the future, Meta has said users will be able to interact via Threads with people on other social media platforms.

When asked on Threads whether the app will be "bigger than Twitter", Zuckerberg previously said: "It'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will."

Last week, Meta unveiled Q profits up 16 per cent year-on-year at $7.79bn (£6.09bn), and said there were 3.07bn people active on one of its apps each day.