Instagram releases user figures, now has 90m monthly active users

Popular photo sharing platform Instagram has reported its monthly user stats for the first time. According to the company’s site it currently has 90-million monthly active users sharing 40-million photographs a day.

According to AllThingD, these numbers show a significant growth for the Facebook owned company, given that the number is up 10% in the period from December to January.

“Instagram continues to see very strong growth around the world,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom told AllThingsD. “With many of the product and internationalization improvements we’ve made, we’ve been excited to see these efforts resonate with users globally.”

According to the reported stats, the platform handles more than 1 000 comments per second and over 8 000 likes in a second. A second post by the company’s other co-founder Mike Krieger contradicts the figures a bit stating that Instagram is actually handling more than 10 000 likes a second.

“As we’ve scaled Instagram to an ever-growing number of active users, Postgres has continued to be our solid foundation and the canonical data storage for most of the data created by our users. While less than a year ago, we blogged about how we “stored a lot of data” at Instagram at 90 likes per second, we’re now pushing over 10 000 likes per second at peak—and our fundamental storage technology hasn’t changed.”

Instagram’s number release isn’t a big surprise as there have many murmurs on sites such as the New York Post claiming that the photo platform had lost significant user numbers in the last few months using number from analytics site AppData.

“[We are] pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement,” AppData told The Post last month.

According to the Post report, Instagram daily users fell from 16.4-million to 12.4-million the same week it made changes to its terms of service, which caused much distress among users.

Instagram currently has more than 100-million total users, which grew significantly with the launch of its Android offering last year.