Jack Dorsey's Bitchat Tops France's Social App Chart Amid Riots and Orange Outage

Jack Dorsey's peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat hit No. 1 in the Social Networking category of France's App Store and entered the top 10 free apps overall. The surge followed October 17 cost-of-living protests with over 1,800 arrests, calls for targeted social media blocks, and a nearly 10-hour Orange network outage on October 21.

• Bitchat runs over Bluetooth mesh with no internet, accounts or phone numbers
• Private messages use Noise Protocol encryption; multi-hop range is about 300 meters
• The Orange and Sosh outage lasted from 11:20 a.m. to about 9 p.m. on October 21
• Apple and Google previously pulled the app in China and India at government request