Bitchat Becomes France's Top Social App Amid Riots and Mobile Network Outage

Bitchat, a peer-to-peer messaging app created by Jack Dorsey, surged to the top of France’s App Store social charts and into the top ten free apps after nationwide cost-of-living protests, government talk of targeted social media blocks, and a near ten-hour outage on Orange’s mobile network. Hundreds of thousands joined October 17 demonstrations that included looting and more than 1,800 arrests; senior politicians publicly linked social networks to coordination of unrest and raised the prospect of temporary restrictions. Those dynamics, plus the Orange outage on October 21, prompted many French users to preemptively install an app that can function without conventional internet access, and contributors reported the French geohash channel became so busy it degraded performance.

Bitchat runs primarily over Bluetooth mesh so nearby phones relay encrypted messages without accounts or phone numbers, using the Noise Protocol for end-to-end encryption and offering a public mesh channel readable by nearby users; Android builds can be shared peer-to-peer and the app can bridge to Nostr for wider or geo-based channels when online. Downloads have spiked before in places facing internet shutdowns or unrest - Uganda, Iran, Nepal, Jamaica - and governments have sometimes blocked or removed it from stores, including China and India. Legal constraints in France and the EU make broad platform blackouts harder, but the episode shows how decentralized, store-and-forward tools attract rapid interest when infrastructure or access is threatened.