Instagram passes 500 million users, 300 million daily users

Instagram announced that it now has 500 million users — two-thirds of whom (300 million) use the photo- and video-sharing service every day.

Today’s news comes nine months after Instagram revealed its previous notable milestone of 400 million users, and four years after Facebook acquired the service for a cool $1 billion — at a time when Instagram had a mere 30 million users.

Half-a-billion users is a lot of people for sure, but the figure pales in comparison with Facebook itself, which is now edging close to two billion users, and WhatsApp — the messaging service Facebook acquired for around $20 billion — which recently passed one billion users.

Much of Instagram’s growth has come from international markets, and today it claims that 80 percent of its users live outside its native U.S.