Meta acquires the Threads.com domain name

Meta has acquired the Threads.com domain name, according to Whois records of the URL that were updated on September 24.

Users on domain-related forums pointed out this transfer, and TechCrunch confirmed the Whois records of Threads.com separately, which list Meta's Instagram as the registrant.

TechCrunch reached out to Meta to understand if it plans to move its Threads social network to Threads.com, but the company didn't offer an immediate response.

The social networking company had launched it on Threads.net URL because Threads.com was owned by a Sequoia-backed Slack alternative startup company.

At that time, the team communication startup said that after Meta launched its social network, a few companies approached them about an acquisition. In June, Shopify acquired Threads.com for an undisclosed amount.

"Around the same time [when Threads.com was considering selling the domain], a handful of companies approached us, wondering if we would be open to an acquisition,” the company said in the post on its homepage at the time of announcing the acquisition. "When this happened in the past, we would politely decline. However, this time, things were different. We weren’t that excited about the time it would take to invest in a rebrand, and with mind-warping technological advances now being a commodity, we were excited about joining a place where we could tinker at scale," the post explained.

Shopify has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Threads.com saw a spike in its app downloads around the time when Meta launched its social network. In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Threads.com's co-founder and CEO Rousseau Kazi, who previously worked at Facebook, said Threads is a "powerful word and an internet-native term."

More than a year after its launch, Meta's Threads has scaled to more than 200 million users.