Twitter co-founder and current Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat has climbed to the number one spot in the Social Networking category of the App Store in France and also entered the top ten free apps in any category. The surge in downloads followed a nationwide cost-of-living mobilization on Saturday that saw looting and mass arrests, calls by former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal for temporary, targeted social media blocks, and a nearly ten-hour Orange mobile network outage on Wednesday.

Dorsey originally announced Bitchat on July 6th of last year as a weekend project to learn Bluetooth mesh networking, relays, store-and-forward models, and encryption. He described it as having “IRC vibes,” a reference to early internet messaging protocol Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

The app runs primarily over Bluetooth mesh networks so nearby phones can pass messages without internet, accounts, or phone numbers.…