Instagram passes 600 million users

Instagram Stories

Aping Snapchat seems to have paid off in a major way for photo-sharing service Instagram as it announced passing a whopping 600 million users earlier today. The last hundred million Instagrammers joined the service in the past six months, said the Facebook-owned company.

Instagram infamously ripped off Snapchat Stories with its own Stories feature, which debuted in early-August.

“From all of us at Instagram, thank you for being you,” wrote the company.

“We can’t wait to see what you’ll make next.”

Instagram had 300 million monthly active accounts in December 2014 and 500 million monthly users in mid-June 2016. Its CEO Kevin Systrom recently said that Snapchat deserves all the credit for coming up with the Stories feature “just like Instagram deserves all the credit for bringing filters to the forefront”.

Instagram’s parent company Facebook is also aping Snapchat features.

Earlier today, it updated Messenger with a Snacphat-like feature allowing users to add text art to their media, customize their photos and videos with stickers, filters and more.

Instagram has of course been quite busy in terms of adding new features, such as the ability to save posts for later, broadcast live video, disable comments on a per-post basis, send and receive vanishing media in direct messages, use Boomerang features within the app, saving unfinished posts as drafts and more.

Source: Instagram