Was the news of Instagram's decline greatly exaggerated?

The official tally: 90 million monthly active users, 40 million photos per day, 8,500 likes per second

Instagram
(Image credit: CC BY: taylorhatmaker)

In December, the New York Post reported that Instagram was bleeding daily active users, part of a backlash to a controversial revision of the company's terms of service that allowed it to sell user-generated photos to advertisers. Users had been understandably outraged. Justin Bieber told his 5 million followers he was leaving the service for good. (He didn't.) National Geographic, in unusually dramatic fashion, briefly suspended its popular account too. All in all, it was bad news for mobile's biggest success story, and it only got worse when third-party analytics firm AppData told the Post that Instagram had lost a mind-boggling 4 million daily active users due to the controversy. But as we reported back then, those numbers were highly questionable.

On Friday, for the first time in months, Instagram released an analytics report, and confirmed what many suspected — the company is doing just fine. Growing, even, up 10 percent from December to January. Here's what the report revealed:

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Chris Gayomali is the science and technology editor for TheWeek.com. Previously, he was a tech reporter at TIME. His work has also appeared in Men's Journal, Esquire, and The Atlantic, among other places. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.