Then over the weekend, Mr. Musk imposed limits on how many tweets its users would be able to read when using the app. He said the move was in response to other companies taking Twitter’s data in a process called “scraping.” Twitter’s users were soon met with messages that they had exceeded their “rate limit,” effectively making the app unusable after a short amount of time viewing posts. Many Twitter users became frustrated.

“If there’s ever been a more self-destructive owner of a multibillion-dollar enterprise who resents the very customers who determine the success of that enterprise, I am unaware of it,” Lou Paskalis, founder and chief executive of AJL Advisory, a marketing and advertising technology strategy firm, said of Mr. Musk and Twitter.

The latest turbulence at Twitter appears to have given Mr. Zuckerberg an opening for Threads.

Meta’s executives have discussed how to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter since last year, including by building a rival service. “Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in an internal post last year, according to a report in December by The New York Times. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”

That has resulted in Threads, a crash project spun out of Instagram and internally code-named Project 92. Users will be able to log into Threads using their Instagram account, according to photo previews of the app displayed in Apple’s App Store.

Meta executives previously characterized the app as a “sanely run” version of a public-facing social network, in a not-so-subtle jab at Mr. Musk’s erratic behavior.