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Photo-sharing haven Instagram has hit 500 million users, the Facebook-owned social media platform has said.
According to the photography and social media app, more than 300 million of its users visit the app every single day – nearly the same amount that are active on Twitter each month – and that more than 80% of its userbase was outside the US.
It’s an impressive milestone for the app, which started out life as a check-in service similar to Foursquare before moving into image sharing and eventually being bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012.
Celebrities, astronauts and even the Pope are among those with an Instagram account, with the site calling the content its users upload a mixture of the “everyday and the epic”.
This figures update is also a telling moment for Facebook, which has seen another of the platforms it owns, WhatsApp, recently move past one billion users, while its other messaging app – Facebook Messenger – has around 900 million users. Mark Zuckerberg’s firm now has a significant lead across the social media market, and massive user numbers on each site to go with it.
