X just had its biggest exodus to date

X, formerly known as Twitter, just had the highest number of people in the US deactivate their accounts since Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and people started threatening to leave it, new data from digital market-intelligence company Similarweb shows.

Some 115,000 users in the US deactivated their accounts Wednesday, the day after the presidential election. Some users voiced discontent with the social-media site over owner Musk’s support of Donald Trump. (Similarweb doesn’t have data for deactivations through the mobile app.)

“It’s still small when it comes to the scale of the entire service, but it does show that people aren’t bluffing,” David Carr, a Similarweb spokesman, told Sherwood.

Many of those users are flocking to alternative sites like Meta’s Threads and Bluesky. Bluesky alone gained 700,000 new users in the week after the election.

At the same time, X saw the highest traffic of the year that same day, with US web traffic on Wednesday hitting 46.5 million visits, or nearly 40% higher than the average for the past few months. In the days following, traffic on X has returned to recent norms.