Instagram surpasses 100 million users

It’s official: More than 100 million people are sharing filtered photos of their five-course dinners and cats sleeping on windowsills.
Instagram today announced the milestone, reporting that in two and a half years, the popular image-sharing service has surpassed 100 million users.
“It’s easy to see this as an accomplishment for a company,” co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post, “but I think the truth is that it’s an accomplishment for our community.”
In a nostalgic post, Systrom returned to Instagram’s first offices: a couple of rented desks in a co-working space on a pier overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He remembered a “particularly unforgiving and chilly fall” evening in Oct. 2010. The Giants were playing the Phillies half a mile away, and only a few thousand people around the world were using Instagram.
“We had a sense that maybe through Instagram we could tune in to what was happening just a few steps away,” Systrom wrote. “With a few quick commands at his terminal, my co-founder Mike [Krieger’s] screen filled with images of the game: the bullpen, dugout, concession stands, cheering fans and a panoramic view from somewhere up high.” Now, people are still capturing the world in real-time, but on a much grander scale. Facebook bought the company for a reported $1 billion last year, and in January, the photo-sharing site hit 90 million users.
The site had a bumpy December, however. A planned privacy policy update suggested that Instagram had the right to sell users’ photos, angering celebs and average users alike. The company later denied that was the plan and backtracked on certain privacy policy updates. Not everyone was satisfied, though — the Facebook-owned company was hit with its first civil lawsuit as a result of the proposed changes. Instagram recently asked that the case be tossed in part because the person who sued is still using the service.