Millions in Brazil flock to social media platform Bluesky following judge's ban on Musk's X.

• In a week, two million new users joined Bluesky, as stated in a post by the company.
• The surge in traffic on the platform occurred following a Brazilian Supreme Court justice's order to suspend the X platform nationwide on Friday.

The recent ban of Elon Musk's social media platform X in Brazil has increased the popularity of its smaller competitor, Bluesky, as individuals look for alternative platforms to express their views.

On Wednesday, several users reported an outage with the Bluesky app, which had attracted two million new users in a week.

"Paul Frazee, a Bluesky developer, stated in a post that there will likely be some outages and performance problems. He added, "We've never experienced traffic like this. Stay with us!""

On Saturday, users from Brazil were setting new all-time highs for activity, the company announced.

The suspension of the X platform led to an increase in the platform's traffic, which was later upheld by a Supreme Court panel on Monday.

Prior to the ban, X had stated that it would not adhere to Brazilian court orders regarding its content moderation policies and the appointment of a new legal representative in the country.

Alexandre de Moraes, the judge, has imposed daily fines on individuals and businesses in Brazil who use VPNs or other methods to access X, as reported by local media.

X is estimated to have over 22 million users in Brazil.

On Wednesday, Meta Platforms' X-alternative app, Threads, was the second most popular free app on Brazil's iOS App Store, surpassed only by Bluesky.

On Wednesday, the official Threads account posted on social media, "We're so back."

Market share battle

In 2019, Bluesky was launched as a project to create an open, decentralized social protocol, backed by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. The company became independent in 2021, but Dorsey severed ties with the platform earlier this year.

X has been challenged as the top microblogging platform by Bluesky, Threads, and the open-source, decentralized network Mastodon.

In 2022, during the controversies surrounding Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and his subsequent changes to the platform, these companies experienced a surge in their user base.

Last month, Bluesky's sign-ups from the U.K. increased, coinciding with Musk's controversial comments about nationwide riots in the country.

Despite rumors of advertisers and users leaving X, no viable alternatives have emerged as a viable threat to X.

According to a post by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in August, Threads has the most monthly active users, with over 200 million.

In May, Musk announced that X had 600 million monthly active users and approximately 300 million daily active users.