France network outage puts Jack Dorsey’s offline messaging app Bitchat in the spotlight
A mobile network outage at French telecom operator Orange helped push Bitchat, an offline messaging app created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, to the top of France’s App Store social networking chart and into the top 10 free apps overall. The app does not require a phone number, account registration, or an internet connection, and uses Bluetooth mesh networking to relay messages across nearby devices. Dorsey first unveiled the project on July 6, 2025, describing it as a weekend experiment built with Block’s open-source AI coding tool Goose. The renewed attention came after large protests in France and a proposal by former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to temporarily restrict social networks in riot-hit areas, though the article notes that the outage and the policy discussion were unrelated. Bitchat also supports encrypted direct messages, public channels, local data wipe features, and can connect to longer-distance networks through Nostr when internet access returns. On Android, it can pass Cashu ecash tokens over Bluetooth, though that does not amount to fully offline Bitcoin settlement. Security remains a major issue. TechCrunch previously reported that researchers found an authentication flaw in early versions of Bitchat, and Dorsey has warned that the software has not undergone sufficient external security review for sensitive communications.
